The Consequences of the Coming Machine Translation Armageddon Are Difficult to Predict

The consequences of a nuclear war are difficult to predict.

Difficult, but not completely impossible to prepare for and anticipate.

In fact, the world has been preparing for nuclear Armageddon for about 70 years now. Regular people were being prepared for just such an eventuality by being instructed by their teachers from an early age to duck and hide under the desks in their classrooms, or by running in an orderly fashion to take shelter in the school’s basement. This was by far my favorite part of atomic bomb drills when I was a kid because the basement of the old school, which was built in 1886, was dark, spooky and totally awesome.

Not that running to the basement would help very much, of course, depending on how far the bomb would fall and the extent of the radioactive fallout.

Important people, such as presidents of various governments, have been preparing themselves by having huge anti-atomic bomb shelters dug, for themselves and their families, so that they can continue waging nuclear war from a safe underground location until the glorious victory.

In the long run, this would probably not help very much either, but building anti-nuclear shelters for important people has been a nice and constant source of income for the nuclear bomb shelter building and maintenance industry since the 1940s.

One good thing about a nuclear war is that since it can anticipated, it is possible to make preparations for something like that, although the preparations will probably be inadequate.

The consequences of the coming Armageddon and the fallout from machine translation are much more difficult to anticipate. As a result, nobody seems to be giving much thought to the bleak future that humankind is facing as a result of excessive reliance on machine translation, which the translation industry now prefers to call “language technology tools”, and I don’t see any individuals or organizations making any preparations for the havoc the machine translation Armageddon will most likely wreak on our civilization in the very near future.

One thing about a nuclear bomb is that is likely to fall on us only once, and although the consequences would then remain with us for a very long time, we would know that it had already happened, and we could then try to figure out what to do next.

But the bad thing about machine translation is that we simply can’t know anything for sure about it because it works like a slow-acting, invisible virus that may have no cure.

We kind of know that there is a lot of machine translation out there already, and once we know that what we are dealing with is machine translation, we are already pretty safe because most people at this point understand that machine translation is not really translation, even when it sometimes kind of looks like a real translation.

Sometimes, machine translation is immediately identifiable as such because it sounds as very poor translation, even worse than a really horrible human translation.

But sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish one from the other.

For example, is the text below the product of machine translation, or of human translation?

(I saw a photo of this translation of instructions on Facebook, so this is a genuine set of very helpful instructions in English that came with a phone case.)

This is the PCV Mobile phone Case of easy shlepping and more function. This case is made with import and defended radialization materials. And the appearance is so beautiful.

The main characteristic is easy schlepping, it can be hunged up at the waist, hunged up at the cervix, and free holding.

Hang up at the waist: This case has steel button and high strength PC clip. The mobile phone can be hunged up with the case at the waist. And it can be went round and round for 365° .

Hang up at the cervix: This case has high strength and defended snap soft fibre sling. The sling will defend hurt to the cervix and defend breaking.

Free holding: If you will put the mobile phone into your placket, or hold in your hand, you can twist off the button of the case. Because it is so easy.

I think this translation is most likely a sample of the carnage that can be inflicted on a relatively simple text by a human translator (for lack of a better word), who is probably using machine translation for inspiration. But the responsibility would in this case rest squarely with the human who thinks he is a translator, because the machine translation tool would in this case be completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

After all, it is clear that what the text means is that the phone case can be attached to something like a lanyard and worn around the neck. If you know some Latin, you would also know that cervix is Latin for neck. So a moderately educated and intelligent person would probably realize what the word cervix means neck in this case (although most men might have to look up the word cervix on Wikipedia to make sure what and where it is.)

So even a highly entertaining translation like the one above would be easy to figure out and would also be quite easy to edit, even without having access to the original text in the original language.

On the other hand, it is a very different story when we are dealing with machine translation.

Because machine translations have improved over the last decade, unlike in the recent past, it is now often very difficult, if not impossible, to identify mistranslations in them because those mistranslations sound logical and plausible.

After all, machine translation operating on the basis of the statistical model (as opposed to the grammatical model) is based on real translations of the same kinds of texts that were produced by human translators, usually very good ones.

I have been translating applications of German patents that are to be filed in English in the United States for several patent law firms for quite some time now. Some of the law firms send me a Microsoft Word file with the original German name, which is what I prefer because there is no room for error in this solution.

But some of them use a machine translation to translate the title of the patent because it is easier for a legal secretary to keep track of titles she can understand.

Since nobody has told me how the titles are translated into English, I used to think that I should try to incorporate the words in these titles into my translations, since those are the words my clients are using.

But eventually I understood that I should not try to do that. The titles are sometimes so clearly wrong that the only reason for such incomprehensible mistakes must be that the source is a machine translation.

At the same time, when I start translating a patent, the translated words helpfully supplied by a specialized machine translation program, although they are completely wrong, sound plausible even to me, an experienced patent translator who has access to the text in the original language.

I sometimes even use the wrong words for several pages before I realize where the problem is and correct the misleading English title.

Can you imagine what would happen if high ranking politicians, the ones who have had deep underground bunkers dug for themselves so that they can survive a nuclear attack, decided in their infinite wisdom that one way to reduce the government’s deficit would be to eliminate human translations and replace them instead with machine translations, perhaps only lightly edited by human post-processors, who would be paid much less than actual translators?

The actual meaning of this communication might no longer be identifiable.

And what about things like product instruction manuals, patents, laws and legal ordinances, or even novels, for example – what if big corporations and publishing houses decided to save money by switching to machine translation, lightly edited by poorly-paid humans called post-editors?

Based on what this patent translator knows about machine translation, namely how difficult it is to identify mistranslations in a text that was translated by a machine with a software package, I believe that the impact of such an unwise decision would be tantamount to nuclear war.

Better in some respects – we would not be dying in millions right away, for example, because the results of the machine translation Armageddon would take a long time to seep into the fabric of society.

But because it would take such a long time to identify what the problem is (politicians and CEOs of multinational corporations would of course not tell us they had switched to machine translation to save money), the consequences of such a switch for human civilization might be even more dire than an all-out nuclear war.

Personally, I think that this world could probably recover from a major nuclear conflict, although it would take a very long time.

But I don’t know whether recovery from an insipid shift in society that would take place very slowly, while most people might not be realizing it, if communication between humans were replaced by communication that is automatically carried out by machines operating much more efficiently on the basis of algorithms, would be even possible.