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No Language Left Behind

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Re: No Language Left Behind

#81

Post by epolanski »

labrador wrote: post #66

I'll know AI translators are any good when the United Nations starts using them "Skills required: United Nations translators are required to have a perfect command of their main language and an excellent knowledge of, in most cases, two other official languages" https://www.un.org/dgacm/en/content/translation

My ex is a translator at an embassy, and she always said that ai translators are a godsend.

On one side they make their work easier as they can focus more on correcting the ai produced text and focus on author's meaning while eliminating lots of plumbing.

On the other hand they increased the amount of business because much more text is translated than at any other point in history, which requires validation in most business, legal and even personal contexts. Without ai translators those translations would've not happened in the first place.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#82

Post by ShamelessC »

LtWorf wrote: post #49

Facebook translations are horrifying for the mainstream languages already. They go from completely wrong to kinda understandable but still wrong.

Look, I fucking hate Facebook to the point that I can't really be objective about their research. Whenever I see a section on ethical implications or impacts I just think about shit like Myanmar or the insurrection and laugh (cry).

But this is a shallow dismissal that doesn't add anything valuable to the discussion.

"Oh they made their _terrible_ (probably state of the art) machine translation _better_??! Those monsters!!"

Re: No Language Left Behind

#83

Post by [deleted] »

samatman wrote: post #78
labrador wrote: post #66

I'll know AI translators are any good when the United Nations starts using them "Skills required: United Nations translators are required to have a perfect command of their main language and an excellent knowledge of, in most cases, two other official languages" https://www.un.org/dgacm/en/content/translation

An organization built out of pure prestige, with no concept of monetary profit, has zero pressure to stop employing their classmates as translators, ever.

[deleted]

Re: No Language Left Behind

#84

Post by labrador »

epolanski wrote: post #81
labrador wrote: post #66

I'll know AI translators are any good when the United Nations starts using them "Skills required: United Nations translators are required to have a perfect command of their main language and an excellent knowledge of, in most cases, two other official languages" https://www.un.org/dgacm/en/content/translation

My ex is a translator at an embassy, and she always said that ai translators are a godsend. On one side they make their work easier as they can focus more on correcting the ai produced text and focus on author's meaning while eliminating lots of plumbing. On the other hand they increased the amount of business because much more text is translated than at any other point in history, which requires validation in most b…

I'm surprised this didn't occur to me until after I posted because it fits with my general feeling that AIs will be nothing more than collaborative tools for the foreseeable future.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#85

Post by astrange »

epolanski wrote: post #81
labrador wrote: post #66

I'll know AI translators are any good when the United Nations starts using them "Skills required: United Nations translators are required to have a perfect command of their main language and an excellent knowledge of, in most cases, two other official languages" https://www.un.org/dgacm/en/content/translation

My ex is a translator at an embassy, and she always said that ai translators are a godsend. On one side they make their work easier as they can focus more on correcting the ai produced text and focus on author's meaning while eliminating lots of plumbing. On the other hand they increased the amount of business because much more text is translated than at any other point in history, which requires validation in most b…

Most media translators consider MTL worse than nothing, because editing it is actually harder than just doing it yourself. Can especially be an issue for neural MTL because the output is both fluent (looks natural) and inaccurate.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#86

Post by makeitdouble »

madrox wrote: post #73
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #27

My concern with this is that in low resource languages the unavoidable biases of the ML models might overpower their own organic development. We shrug off all the little quirks of machine translated text because it usually gets the point across, and we recognize them as quirks because most of what we read was written by real people with no such quirks. But when most of what you read contain those quirks, I fear those…

This happens without machine translation in the wild already with pidgin. If you want to see real life pidgin in action, watch korean and english gamers interact in FPS games. This has been common at the borders of cultures where two languages interact. Point being, I'm not sure if language purity is more valuable than functionally allowing its people to interact with things they couldn't otherwise. Put another way,…

People present these as the choice between 0 (“locked out”) and 1.

In real world instances (the proverbial 80%), it’s more often transforming a 0.4 (“don’t know much english”) into a 0.7. And the people who get away with near 0 knowledge will usually have no critical need for translation, or an access to other means (an actual translator, social help etc.) when really needed.

My mental image is grandmas reading online news, and machine translation would be a blessing and a curse. Or low grade school kids trying to look for some help on a topic, and a I’d wish they get more time with the original text to at least somewhat learn, than only getting the rough translation full of errors.

For interpersonal communication, people adjust, that’s what has been happening for centuries now.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#89

Post by protomyth »

zen_1 wrote: post #60
protomyth wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it will interesting when it runs into a language (e.g. Dakota) where the women and men speak differently. Should be an interesting test.

Doesn't seem to be a big issue for Arabic, where verbs are gendered (so in the sentence "I am going to the store", the verb "to go" will be either masculine or feminine, reflecting the speaker's gender).

That's not what I meant. It isn't the words that are gendered, but the way the speaker talks that is gendered. My old boss was taught to speak by her uncles. Her female relatives teased her since she talked like a man.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#90

Post by david_allison »

hello_im_angela wrote: post #80
david_allison wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Jeff, I currently host the largest collection of bilingual Manx[0] English texts (~1MM words). How would I formally get in contact to chat about the steps to make machine translation available (and would there be grant opportunities available for further production of machine-readable data?) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language

could you send me an email please? It's available on our paper, page 1: https://research.facebook.com/publications/no-language-left-... Regarding grants: we have offered compute grants previously with the Workshop on Machine Translation (last year: https://www.statmt.org/wmt21/flores-compute-grants.html , this year: https://statmt.org/wmt22/large-scale-multilingual-translatio... ) and we have an RFP, but it's current…

Done, let me know if it didn't go through
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