On World Translation Day, for these reasons, the profession of translators does not seem to be in danger soon

Imran Abdullah

On World Translation Day, which falls on 30 September each year, the United Nations and the International Federation of Translators, founded in the 1950s, celebrate the efforts of translators and the global translation community, in an effort to promote the old profession that is now in intense competition with machines and artificial intelligence. Needed in an age of globalization and communication.

A few years ago, Google announced the launch of the Neural Machine Translation System (GNMT), stressing that machine translations could not be distinguished from human translations, and there was a growing belief that the profession was on its way to extinction by machines.

However, the promises of programmers to remove language barriers and the lack of need for translators do not seem to have materialized. For decades, when the first computerized translation was created, translators still working in various fields, including politics, trade, media and tourism, have not been dispensed with. And even government departments. It is increasingly believed that machine translation will serve as auxiliaries to, rather than substitute for, human translators for a variety of reasons.

Translate words or ideas?
Many translators believe that machines translate words, while humans translate ideas that automated software and algorithms cannot transfer between different languages. All they do is convert words into another language using dictionaries, grammar and language.

But translation is not merely the translation of language words into another language, and here shows the great disadvantage of machines.

The Moroccan philosopher Taha Abdel Rahman distinguishes between three different types of translation, namely, “collective translation”, which transmits texts without distinction and calendar, and “conductive translation,” which maintains the partial incompatibility between philosophy and translation and conveys everything that does not appear to be a clear violation of grammar. And "authentic translation", which aims to raise the conflict between philosophy and translation and transmits what it has to agree with the controls of the deliberative field transferred to him linguistically and cognitively and even nodal.

Mistakes and emotions
In addition, machines cannot identify and correct errors in the original text. Unlike spelling and typographical errors, software and algorithms do not recognize source text errors and linguistically transform them into the target language without realizing that they are fundamentally wrong. Is the human translator.

Machines do not read emotions, treat human-loaded texts in a neutral way, while professional translators can find equivalent "code" in the other language, and may reconstruct the whole sentence or paragraph using different words from the original text to convey the emotional charge and achieve the same response. Readers.

This requires a deep understanding of not only the source language and the target language, but also the different cultures behind languages. Despite the tremendous development of machine translation engines and software and providing them with enormous texts, the possibility of recognizing context, ideas and culture remains limited to machines.

In a previous report for the magazine "Le Zico", the French magazine cited the views of a number of translation experts who praised the advances in machine translation thanks to the use of a machine learning system based on networks of neurons, the latest smart technology currently.

But the report itself pointed to errors in machine translation in an experiment to translate the verses of the poet Charles Baudelaire, for example, as the machine translation did not succeed in doing what was required and only a literal translation without translation meanings.

Journalist Gideon Lewis of The New York Times says that artificial intelligence in translation has made it possible within two years to match the 10-year progress, adding that neuron networks are now able to discover the links between languages.

Culture and Sculpture Terminology
Yet machines cannot formulate new terms that express new concepts and processes that did not exist before. Philosophers, writers, and even technologists use different creative ways to derive and generate the words they need to express new ideas or techniques. In contrast, machines lack this innovative approach, which requires high analytical capabilities, even for technical concepts.

Machines cannot convey the aesthetics of text and spirit in great literary works. The literary ingenuity of writers is a special feature of writers who can create beautiful metaphors to evoke strong emotions, often the result of hard creative work. Even if machines are capable of replacing translators in certain fields, literary translation will remain the exclusive prerogative of skilled translators. In contrast, machines can effectively replace “translators” who translate in a “mechanical” and non-creative way.

Lacking machines to understand different cultures around the world, they fail to recognize the complexities behind special cultural expressions and cannot translate them to their equivalent in the target language. Context plays a confusing role for machines, while translators serve human beings and help them master the transfer of meaning.