Speaker: Hajime Sato
Session Title: Professional Forum: Artificial Intelligence’s Impacts and AI as a Tool for Japanese <> English Linguists
Review Author: Syra Morii
Outgoing JLD administrator Hajime Sato presented the results of a JLD survey he conducted with our members on AI’s impacts along with how the survey responses matched up with wider industry trends. One of the biggest takeaways was that a large share of JLD respondents have seen a drop in translation work from agencies and around half say that AI has hurt their businesses.
On the flip side, many respondents also use AI in their work, often to do research and as a checker or writing assistant. Mirroring information presented in other sessions, many translators and interpreters are now effectively harnessing AI to improve the quality and/or speed of their output.
Amid the uncertainty and the doom and gloom brought on by the AI-driven shakeup of our industry, Hajime’s perspective on AI left me feeling more optimistic than before. Specifically, AI cannot think or reason—it is only a language predictor that is good at guessing what the next word should be. It parses up words and even parts of words into tokens that are fed into algorithms and manipulated to spit out the word with the highest probability of coming next. AI also has imprecision built into its model, so it will not translate the same term the same way every time, although this is what is needed in technical fields.
Conversely, we humans are the ones who can reason and think, who can understand context and discern intent, who can consider the audience and objective of the text we’re working with and craft something that takes all these factors holistically into account. We understand when accuracy is needed and why. And now, after this presentation, I have a better understanding of both the benefits and limitations of AI to use in educating clients and others about AI and the value human translators and interpreters offer.
Edited by: audra lincoln
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