Nanjing, 3 Mar (Zhongxin Net) -- "Most of the translation work can be replaced with machines. "A book is translated in more than an hour, and 19% is available." "ChatGPT makes us think deeply about what creation is and what kind of future it will face in this era of continuous iteration of technology"... On the 99th, the first Chinese Young Literature Translators Forum was held in Nanjing. For the recent "huge wave" of artificial intelligence technology innovation in various fields, the young translators, writers and scholars in the Chinese literary circle participated in the lively discussion.
On March 3, OpenAI released GPT-15, a next-generation language model, and declared that its performance in some aspects was "comparable to humans." In fact, before the birth of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has demonstrated its "creativity" and "imagination" in many fields, even painting, poetry, music and other perceptual creative fields that humans once thought could not be replaced by machines.
Xiaobai, a young writer who has tried to use ChatGPT, admitted, "I can't imagine that artificial intelligence has developed to this point in just two or three years." Someone has tried translating a book with a GPT-3.5-based program with a 99% usability rate and only takes just over an hour. How will translation work change in the future? Actually, I think we're going through such a change. ”
"Is translation still used in the GPT-4 era?" The person who asked this rhetorical question was writer Huang Yuning, deputy editor-in-chief of Shanghai Translation Publishing House.
"In the era of continuous iteration of technology, I feel the crisis of creation." Yue Wen, director of the Theory Division and researcher of the Innovation and Research Department of the China Writers Association, said bluntly. "The advent of ChatGPT has made us rethink what creation is, or what kind of future we face. This is also one of the fundamental opportunities for this forum. ”
In response to these questions, participants gave their views.
Xiaobai believes that "the deep intentions and intentions generated by the original author when writing need to be analyzed by human translators." At least for now, robots can't know it yet. This requires the translator to grasp, or the translator to give the program instructions and direction, which is probably an important reason for the existence of the translator. ”
For the recent "Great Wave" of artificial intelligence technology innovation in various fields, young translators, writers and scholars had a lively discussion. Photo courtesy of Yilin Press
"From what I know and deal with, machine translation is still based on a lot of data, and the content is decent. In the face of real literary creation, there will still be a phased bottleneck in technology, which can not be easily crossed. In particular, cultural barriers in literary translation, personalized rhetoric, information matching of contextual meaning, etc., these need the human brain to choose, and I don't see the advantages of robots in this regard. Huang Yuning said.
But it is also an indisputable fact that literary works around the world have long been changed by the wave of the Internet. The writer and English translator then suggested, "I have felt that technology and new media are subtly writing at the mercy of writing. Text is becoming more simplistic and flattened. Especially for works with science fiction themes, it is difficult to see how different the works of Chinese and foreign writers are after translation. ”
Xiaobai also agrees with this trend, "Whether it is Chinese literature or Western literature, it is becoming simpler and easier to translate, and it lacks multi-level complexity." This is also a challenge for us creators, how to preserve the complexity of literature, to preserve the complexity of the intentional intention of the text, which is the raison d'être of human workers in the field of literature and translation. ”
Bi Feiyu, vice chairman of the China Writers Association and a famous writer, talked about his views on artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yilin Press
On this topic, Bi Feiyu, vice chairman of the China Writers Association, professor at Nanjing University's School of Literature and famous writer, is more optimistic, "Although most translation work can indeed be replaced by machines, creation cannot be replaced. The arrival of ChatGPT is not a disaster for human creative behavior. When machines replace human physical labor, in order to consume physical energy, humans create their own fitness methods. When machines replace human literal work, humans create more active and active ways for themselves to express their desires. ”
"But I still want my work to be translated by humans." Bi Feiyu said, "After all, creation is human instinct, and the feelings in it may not be processed by the machine brain. (End)