AW: Breaking barriers

[James Kass]

On 2021-10-21 9:41 AM, Dreiheller, Albrecht via Unicode wrote:
> Without understanding the context, Live Translate won't have a good chance to find the right translation.
> Machine translation often only pretends to know the meaning but in fact it fails.
> I'm not worried about human translators.
They may be safe in the short-term.  Machine translation is much, much 
better than it was at the onset.  I recall translating a German web page 
about the Phaistos disk into English and the page title was translated 
as "The Discotheques of Phaistos".  (That was a foreshadowing of what to 
expect in the article, which was amusing to read through.)  Even before 
machine translation, translations could be humorous.  A French speaking 
friend once told me that the French title of a certain Steinbeck novel 
could translate back into English as "The Raisins of Anger".

The web page of Google Translate offers an option for the end user to 
contribute suggestions for improving the specific translation. This 
would be expected to make the machine translations better over time.  If 
this option is also offered in Live Translate, which travels around town 
in pockets and purses and accepts source material from more than 
plain-text, wouldn't that expedite machine translation improvement?

And what will happen when AI is added to the mix?