{"id":2435,"date":"2025-03-05T13:12:02","date_gmt":"2025-03-05T12:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/?p=2435"},"modified":"2025-03-05T04:06:06","modified_gmt":"2025-03-05T03:06:06","slug":"ata65-review-i-cant-place-the-accent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/SLD\/ata65-review-i-cant-place-the-accent\/","title":{"rendered":"ATA65 Review: I Can’t Place the Accent"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Review of: I Can\u2019t Place the Accent: Identifying the Characteristics Traits of Computer Translation, <\/em>presented by Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya, CT and John Riedl, CT on Friday, November 1 at ATA65<\/p>\n

Review by Christine Pawlowski; slides from the presentation available in the Slavic Languages Presentation Archive<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

I do not feel threatened by AI,\u00a0 and this is not because I think my language skills are superior to the machine. Perhaps it is mostly that my monthly social security check allows me to lighten my workload to a manageable volume. And maybe it is also that I am technologically challenged (being provided with a modem to do my work for FBIS in the 90\u2019s was a huge step).<\/p>\n

In my very limited experience with AI projects, I have enjoyed \u201cbeating\u201d the machine, as when the AI translation of the word \u201cwygodny\u201d in Polish, which may be translated variously as \u201cconvenient\u201d or \u201ccomfortable,\u201d resulted in an English version of an apartment advertisement that sported a comfortable bedroom armoire\u2014perhaps a magician\u2019s prop?<\/p>\n

Well before the October\/November ATA65 Conference, we received a survey from Eugenia and John in which we were asked to select the best translation of several Russian texts, but we were not told who (or what) did the translation. When we arrived at the session, we learned that the translations had been done by Deepl, an NMT (Neural Machine Translation) service launched in 2017; ChatGPT 3.5, an LLM (Large Language Model) service launched in 2022; and a few different humans.<\/p>\n

Given its timeliness, it is not surprising that generative AI figured prominently in many of the conference sessions. John and Eugenia\u2019s session dovetailed beautifully with the subject of Holly Mikkelson\u2019s Wednesday training for ATA graders: Prescriptive and Descriptive Language. In a nutshell, we investigated how we really speak.<\/p>\n

In both Holly\u2019s presentation and that of our Slavists, we looked for the \u201ctell\u201d\u2014a clue or indication that reveals information or suggests a hidden truth. All translators\u2014human or generative AI\u2013have these tells. To find them, we looked to cohesion, fluency, syntax and terminology.<\/p>\n

From the survey results and our on-site bantering about some of the linguistic conundrums, we learned that:<\/p>\n