While AI translations have made strides, there are factors that make human translators irreplaceable. Machine translation is great for straightforward texts, but when it comes to complex content that requires cultural nuance, human translation is still necessary.
In business and in real life, for instance, in healthcare, bad translations can lead to serious consequences. Take this example: The California Pilot pointed out that the state’s COVID site was using a machine translation tool to help with vaccination scheduling. The machine translation mistook the word “book” (“to reserve in advance”) and replaced it with the Spanish word for a leather-bound piece of literature. You see why that mistake would cause mass confusion. Human translators are better than machines because they are capable of understanding the nuance of idioms and humor cross-culturally.
Privacy and Security Concerns
Some organizations have had concerns that the use of machine translation may result in breaches of confidentiality. If translation is done by an online service, then the content data is on a server somewhere. The principle is this: If you use a free service, such as Google Translate, you can be almost certain that your text will be used to “improve the translation services provided”; i.e. parts of it may be shown to other users of the same service if they happen to feed the service with similar source segments. Can users be certain that competitors or others with less-than-honorable intentions won’t be able to access that information? The future of translation is the “human in the loop” method because it combines the best of both worlds, and it is one that human translators seem to be willing to work with.