[luxpir]

Also in the industry and I have a few counterpoints.

1) That the general level of Canadian English is reducing due to immigrants is ludicrous. You have a significant burden of proof for statements like that.

2) Transcreation is usually understood to mean the translation of creative/marketing texts where cultural and local norms are taken into account (think slogans, taglines etc.). It does not typically mean that you re-write the source text, adding new ideas and concepts. All you are doing in that case is fixing a bad source text. Sometimes we get blamed for translating a bad source accurately, so it's a fine line. But it isn't transcreation.

3) "Creative, complex text" does not make up the majority of a commercial translation operation's workload. Literary translation is a fraction of a fraction of the global translation demand. AI/neural net machine translation works for many, many commercial texts. I'd go so far as to say it works for the majority in the major language pairs.

Essentially it is recombining known good, reliable human translations in grammatically sound ways, even using idiom correctly where appropriate. The quality of the output depends on the quality of the input, and as such machine translations can be limited by the corpus it draws from. For example, the swathes of the freely available legal or regulatory texts it receives from the EU. These texts can use 'globalised language' at times, avoiding anything tricky to translate in the other languages that they are to be presented in, but that edges into a side issue of the globalisation of English/languages in general.

Overall, I hear a lot of this from the industry, "oh, it'll never work well enough to replace my job", but that's how you get blindsided. Accepting that it works well for major language pairs at this point is a good first step to accepting a changing industry.

That the industry is growing, and fast, may be down to any and all of a) increased awareness of translation's ROI, b) increased awareness of translation itself through the ever-present dream of ubiquitous, perfect babelfish-like translation and c) globalisation maturing into its final form. There's plenty of work for translators and LSPs for a good while yet, but spinning the line about how bad MT is does not help further the cause.

[not_a_terrorist]

1) It's my impression, friend, I am not trying to propose a "New theory of bad English". I tell it like I experience it. We have customers in Vancouver and in some suburbs of Toronto from which some of the source texts are quite "interesting" to decipher (since you like political corectness, I will leave it at that). That type of text was no existent 20 years ago.

Maybe I am simply linving in a giant selection bias bubble, who knows. And by the way, I am not saying that multi-generation Canadian citizens are better at English writing. Please let's not start a discussion about generalising group attributes, it never ends well, and you know it.

2) Well, I did not want to bore our readers, but your description of transcreation is excellent! Bottom line: we do much, much more text reinterpretation and transcreation these days (and our in-country customers love it!). Again, maybe it's just a selection bias bubble, simply a refelction of the direction our business has evolved.

3) Again, you are right. I will even go farther: the majority of customers do not give a rat's ass about text quality! However, I am in a business where quality and precision of the info is paramount, and AI, with its "best fit" or "most probable" translation, does not cut it.

4) We are on the same page, I also can see several use cases for AI translation. Your examples are excellent.

In conclusion: I a translator who also happen to hold 3 STEM degrees/diploma, so you can be sure I jumped on the AI bandwagon, and I keep following what's new from up close. But as far as I can see, it can only by some kind of tool for certain use cases. It's almost as if it was going to be a separate field of its own. yo!

[sofon]

I'm curious as to why automated translation seems to be so bad for Japanese<->English.

Is Japanese really such an outlier?

English <-> Chinese seems more reasonable. Translation between European languages I would guess is an almost solved problem, but how about between language groups in general?

[white-flame]

It could be cultural, in that Japanese communication style can often be understated, with indirect implications pointing at a meaning without directly specifying it. That can vary greatly depending on the context and subject matter, though.

[not_a_terrorist]

Ouch you tell me!! A couple of our customers use high tech products manufactured in China and Japan, for which the manuals were badly translated from the native language to English, and then we have to mop it up from English to French, for example. It is very labor intensive to decipher what the intent is and then to translate it into direct French sentences, in the style most readers are expecting. Thanks for pointing it out! Again, I doubt a machine could do that kind of work.

[luxpir]

As a general rule it probably depends on what you're trying to translate. If it matches the corpus well, you'll do better. This is simplified, of course, as NMT is a bit of a black-box. But we know the GIGO concept still applies.

Perhaps Japanese has a smaller corpus to draw from. Perhaps less work has been done in that pair. Perhaps you're just not translating the right kind of text. It's hard to say.

Comparing Japanese to Chinese is not really apples to apples. Likewise for European languages. Sharing a writing system in any form (Latin/Roman or Chinese) doesn't really come into it.