The War Between Robots and Humans Is Now Taking Place in Machine Translation (But Mostly Just in Human Imagination)

The war between robots and humans has been going on in human imagination for almost a century now, ever since the Czech writer Karel Čapek coined in 1920 the word “robot” in his science fiction play “R.U.R.” which stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots. The word “robot” itself is derived from the Czech word “robota” which means “forced labor” in Czech (the Russian word “rabota” means just “work”).

Čapek must have been inspired by an old Jewish legend about an artificial monster called Golem, whose creator’s grave can be still seen at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. His name was Rabbi Löw and he died in 1609. I remember all this because I had a date with a pretty girl once at his grave a long time ago. I forgot her name but I still remember her face.

There was always the danger, in human imagination, that if the robots created by people were really as good as the people want them to be, the robots would eventually try to rule the world themselves by getting rid of humans. That is one reason why people were so fascinated by the role Arnold Schwarzenegger played in the Terminator movies.

The current human-made but artificial Terminator destined to erase certain types of humans, namely translators, from existence, is made of silicon and his name is MT as in Machine Translation. But this again is mostly just human imagination.

The people who imagine that one day soon MT will one day soon replace the person who types these words mostly know nothing about translation. They see that MT is available instantaneously and for free on Internet, has been for many years, and that despite incremental improvement, the words “translated” with MT still mostly don’t make sense.

And they don’t understand why.

Even with a different approach to MT, such as the statistical approach that rejects processing of the rules of grammar in both languages and instead relies on enormous amounts of data, the result is for the most part still a far cry from real translation.

I have been arguing in countless article written over the last two decades that MT that is as good as human translation is in fact an impossibility because the computers, no matter how powerful, and software, no matter how clever, can never get around the one category that is essential for real translation – the category of meaning. You can not translate something into another language without understanding what the text in the original language means, and machines by definition don’t “understand” anything. They just process numerical instructions.

Google Translate can be surprisingly good on occasion, sometime to an extent that frightens human translators. But if you take the text of this post and run it for example through Google Translator and Microsoft Translator to “translate” it into another language, the difference between these two MT programs will be probably quite small.

I use relatively simple sentences and relatively simple words in my posts, which makes them relatively easy to process with MT. But I am not necessarily saying things that have been said before, which is a problem with the statistical approach to machine translation.

An intentional rebellion of robots against humans will probably not take place in the next few centuries, although there will probably be a quite a few unintentional ones that humans call “failures”.

And perfectly cogent and intelligently written MT product will probably not be available in the next few centuries either. Machine translation will continue to be used by more and more humans, and the product will continue to be improved, but only incrementally. There may be a revolutionary improvement in MT technology at some point, but it is hard to tell when and what it would be based on. The statistical approach was a really good idea because it freed the software designers from being enslaved by rules of grammar, but it still resulted only in incremental improvement, not a revolutionary one.

The war between robots and humans thus exists only in human imagination. Robots are only machines, and as long as machines don’t understand the concept of “rebellion”, how could they rebel against us?

MT will and already has replaced some human translators, just like robots have replaced some human professions. Bank tellers have been replaced for the most parts by ATMs. There are still some human bank tellers in banks, but these are mostly people who are being trained for managerial positions. Most of the simple tasks, such as receiving deposits and giving cash to customers, have been fully automated decades ago.

Some human translators must have been already replaced by MT. In the field of patent translation, which happens to be my field, MT has been available for at least two decades. So what has been the impact of MT in my field so far?

Nobody has the data, of course, but as far as I can tell, the fluctuating amount of work that is available to this human translator is probably not influenced very much by MT.

On the one hand, MT has decreased the demand for translation of patents that did not really need to be translated because before peoples started using MT, how could they tell which document was relevant?

On the other hand, more documents that are relevant and that need to be translated are discovered now with MT, which increases the amount of work available to human translators.

As far as I can tell, instead of removing human translators from the translation process, the overall result of machine translation is probably a slight increase in the amount of work that is available to human translators, at least in my field.