The program uses state-of-the-art AI techniques, but simple tests show that it's a long way from real understanding. On Sunday, at one of our weekly salsa sessions, my friend Frank brought along a Danish guest. I knew Frank spoke Danish well, because his mother was Danish, and he had lived in Denmark as a child. As for his friend, her English was fluent, as is standard for Scandinavians. However, to my surprise, during the evening's chitchat, it emerged that the two friends habitually exchanged emails using Google Translate. Frank would write a message in English, then run it through Google Translate to produce a new text in Danish; conversely, she would write a message in Danish, then let Google Translate anglicize it. How odd! Why would two intelligent people, each of whom spoke the other's language well, do this? My own experiences with machine-translation software had always led me to be highly skeptical of it. But my skepticism was clearly not shared by these two. Indeed, many thoughtful people are quite enamored of translation programs, finding little to criticize in them. This baffles me. As a language lover and an impassioned translator, as a cognitive scientist and a lifelong admirer of the human mind's subtlety, I have followed the attempts to mechanize translation for decades. When I first got interested in the subject, in the mid-1970s, I ran across a letter written in 1947 by the mathematician Warren Weaver, an early machine-translation advocate, to Norbert Wiener, a key figure in cybernetics, in which Weaver made this curious claim, today quite famous:
Some years later he offered a different viewpoint: "No reasonable person thinks that a machine translation can ever achieve elegance and style. Pushkin need not shudder." Whew! Having devoted one unforgettably intense year of my life to translating Alexander Pushkin's sparkling novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, into my native tongue (that is, having radically reworked that great Russian work into an English-language novel in verse), I find this remark of Weaver's far more congenial than his earlier remark, which reveals a strangely simplistic view of language. Nonetheless, his 1947 view of translation as decoding became a credo that has long driven the field of machine translation. Since those days, "translation engines" have gradually improved, and recently the use of so-called deep neural nets has even been suggested to some observers (see "The Great A.I. Awakening" by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New York Times Magazine, and "Machine Translation: Beyond Babel" by Lane Greene in The Economist) that human translators may be an endangered species. In this scenario, human translators would become, within a few years, mere quality controllers and glitch fixers rather than producers of fresh new text.
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Such a development would cause a soul-shattering upheaval in my mental life. Although I fully understand the fascination of trying to get machines to translate well, I am not in the least eager to see human translators replaced by inanimate machines. Indeed, the idea frightens and revolts me. To my mind, translation is an incredibly subtle art that draws constantly on one's many years of life experience, and one's creative imagination. If some "fine" day, human translators were to become relics of the past, my respect for the human mind would be profoundly shaken, and the shock would leave me reeling with terrible confusion and immense, permanent sadness.
Each time I read an article claiming that the guild of human translators will soon be forced to bow down before the terrible, swift sword of some new technology, I feel the need to check the claims out myself, partly out of a sense of terror that this nightmare just might be around the corner, more hopefully out of a desire to reassure myself that it's not just around the corner, and finally, out of my long-standing belief that it's important to combat exaggerated claims about artificial intelligence. And so after reading about how the old idea of artificial neural networks, recently adopted by a branch of Google called Google Brain and now enhanced by "deep learning," has resulted in a new kind of software that has allegedly revolutionized machine translation, I decided I had to check out the latest incarnation of Google Translate. Was it a game-changer, as Deep Blue and AlphaGo were for the venerable games of chess and Go?
