Artificial intelligence and translation companies, allies or enemies?

Artificial Intelligence has become a crucial point in our daily life. That’s a fact that we can’t omit, but what’s the role of Translation companies?

Translators constantly live with the threat over their heads that an AI system will be able to do the job for them in less time and in a cheaper way.

In that way, the latest news about these intelligent systems are unsettling. In February, we woke up with the highest revolution of Chat GPT, a virtual assistant that can write texts through the instructions given by us. This artificial intelligence system, only in two weeks, is used daily by more than two million people. On the other hand, a few days ago Google announced its own tool: Google Bard.

That’s an AI chatbot that uses deep learning algorithms to give clear answers to texts written by users. The user will start a kind of conversation with the chatbot. Here, the AI will give the answers. In that way, that tool will be updated constantly with the talks from users to change the answers as needed.

Moreover, Bard will work as a Google complement, so any person who wants to do a translation, can copy the text to translate and Bard will give a translation in up to 33 languages.

Translation Companies’ role.

Well, in general, this could be more or less like this. However, in automated online translations, it’s different. Idioms, expressions, or the intention of our speech, won’t be translated (for the moment) through algorithms. That’s the point for translation companies that analyse the document or text according to the objective public or in which context it will be used.

As “Diario de Sevilla” published in an interview with Linguavox, a known translation company, the translator must have a deep knowledge of the language to translate and interpret the text correctly.  And we are not only talking about grammatical knowledge; but also about semantics to understand the whole text. Another important factor in which the translation companies beat artificial intelligence is in the cultural baggage of each country, as well as the emotions, literary resources, ironies, or metaphors that only human sensitivity is able to perceive and interpret.

In Gespoint we create specific solutions for translation companies, and we are conscious of the impact that artificial intelligence has in that sector. Nevertheless, we see that progress is like a tool instead of a threat. Even if these processes get better and more accurate, the key is to find a balance between technology, and human and professional translation.