In this FIT North America webinar, esteemed experts John O’Shea LL.B (Hons.) LL.M and Juliette Scott will share their extensive research on the subject of risk and legal translation. Legal translation is where precision meets prevention. Join us in this webinar where the presenters will share aspects of their research, along with many examples of the types of risks that arise, risk multipliers, questions of liability, and diligence in relation to legal translation.
Dangers inherent in using unedited AI, which unpredictably hallucinates, to deliver any high-stakes translation are obvious.
Date: Saturday, December 9th, 2023
Time: 11:00 am CST (Mexico City time); 9 am California; 6 pm Paris
Many thanks to those who helped organize and run the NextGen conference, including, to name just a few, Catherine Marshall, a graduate student in Linguistics, Caitilin Walsh, a well-known figure in FIT member ATA (www.atanet.org) who provided the list of hundreds academic institutions in North America that were invited to send a representative to NextGen, and MIIS faculty member Adam Wooten, who was the liaison with FIT North America.
Also, thanks to the Slator online newsletter about the language industry that contributed space for an article about the NextGen conference that is has been “reprinted” on the FIT North America website (https://fit-northamerica-rc.org/human-translators-and-ai-translation-two-visions-of-the-future/) . We mention this article in particular because it explains the essence of the shared belief of NextGen participants, namely, that there are two visions of the future of translation and interpreting. In one vision, the goal is to automate everything possible (eliminating human jobs in the process), while in the other vision, the goal is to wisely choose between automation and augmentation, that is, augmenting the capabilities of humans.
Finally, a thank you to the leaders of the Localization World conference series, who sent out a notice (https://fit-northamerica-rc.org/locworld50/) of the NextGen conference to ten thousand language professionals, inviting them to come to Monterey for the NextGen conference a few days early. We then promised to help them find the way to the nearby city of San Jose, where the 50th LocWorld conference was held immediately following the upbeat and, by all accounts, successful NextGen conference.
Preliminary Report to the FIT North America Executive Committee and Board
October 5th, 6th, and 7th, 2023, the FIT North America regional center held a conference on educating the next generation of TTIs (translators, terminologists, and interpreters). The venue was the Monterey, California, campus of MIIS (the Middlebury Institute of International Studies), which kindly rented meeting space for the event. Over one hundred people registered for the NextGen conference.
The primary purpose of the conference was to bring together people of Canada, the United States, and Mexico who believe there should be a next generation of TTIs and want to do something about it. Participants included educators and representatives of language service companies.
Steve Richardson, immediate past president of AMTA (Association for Machine Translation in the Americas), and Paco Guzmán, a machine translation developer at Meta (formerly Facebook), both made statements that are on the main page of the NextGen conference (https://fit-northamerica-rc.org/fit-na-next-gen-conference/).
There was no remote real-time access. This was an in-person only event with an emphasis on networking. It began Thursday, October 5th, with a brief opening session that facilitated the creation of small dinner groups consisting of attendees who do not yet know each other. They walked from the Irvine Auditorium to local restaurants. One of the conference sponsors, LanguageLine, paid for thirty restaurant gift certificates that encouraged people to form these dinner groups and get acquainted. Feedback so far indicates that this experiment was successful.
Before splitting up into small dinner groups, the audience heard a pre-recorded greeting by Alison Rodriguez, President of FIT, and a pre-recorded greeting by Jimmy Panetta, who serves California’s 19th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Friday, October 6th, consisted of five invited plenaries with 30-minute networking breaks in between plenary sessions. Our platinum sponsor, MasterWord, made the Indigenous language interpreting plenary possible.
Saturday, October 7th, consisted of a sixth plenary followed by four parallel tracks of submitted presentations.
The primary intended outcomes were to share ideas on how to adapt to the age of Artificial Intelligence and to generate an increased optimism about the future of the Profession. Preliminary feedback from attendees indicates that these outcomes were achieved.
Post-conference tasks for me and my team include bookkeeping, checking and posting audio recordings of presentations, gathering and posting slides from presenters, sending out an evaluation survey to participants, and considering whether to invite presenters to prepare written versions of their presentations for publication as a collection in, for example, Babel, the FIT journal.
An immediate need is to prepare a press release about the NextGen conference.
One vision of the future of the language sector is one in which the goal is automation (fully automatic translation), regardless of the use case. I will call this vision the “Always Full Automation” perspective. A colleague of mine has suggested the tongue-in-cheek acronym AWFull (AlWays Full automation) for this vision. No bias there!
A contrasting vision is one in which the goal is automation in some uses and augmentation of the capabilities of human translators, without replacing them, in other use cases. I will call this vision the “Use Case Sensitive” vision.
We do not yet know which of these visions will dominate a decade from now. No one does. But it is our choice how to proceed in the world of translation, regarding augmentation and automation.
If your personal vision is compatible with the Use Case Sensitive vision of the future, then please consider joining me at the FIT North America NextGen conference in Monterey, California, in early October. See the NextGen conference website for details.
If you are thinking about attending the LocWorld50 conference in San Jose, which will take place right after the NextGen conference, please consider arriving a few days early for NextGen. Then, we will show you the way from Monterey to San Jose.
Automation in the World of Translation
Full automation in our world means delivering raw machine translation output directly to the end user. No post-editing or any other human involvement once the machine translation system has been trained.
It is sometimes assumed that full automation in every use case should be the goal. This dates back to the early days of machine translation when the goal was FAHQT (fully automatic high-quality translation) of every source text you care to feed into the machine. No attention to use case. Anything less indicates failure.
However, there is another way to approach automation, an approach that adds augmentation to the mix.
Augmentation in the World of Translation
In 2015, well before generative AI captured the world’s imagination, the global consulting firm Deloitte published a paper titled “Redesigning Work in an Era of Cognitive Technologies.” In this paper, the authors suggest that attempting to replace a person with a fully automated process is not always the best business strategy. Instead, technology can be used to augment the capabilities of a human. This notion of augmentation is found in much current thinking by economists and executives, along with risk management professionals. The NextGen conference will expand on how technology could augment the capabilities of professional human translators, when full automation is too risky. Think outside the box of post-editing. Augmentation wide open.
For some jobs, the question is binary: replace humans or augment their capabilities. When it comes to professional human translators, the question is far from binary. There are many use cases. In some, such as translating post-discharge instructions for hospital patients with limited English proficiency or translating European Union legislation, augmenting the capabilities of a human translator is clearly the way to go. In other cases, such as translating items in a rapidly changing database of tech support articles or pre-trial triage of foreign-language documents for relevance, a fully automated approach has been successful, selectively followed by human translation.
The NextGen Conference in Monterey
The NextGen conference is being organized by the North America regional center of the International Federation of Translators. It will be a gathering of people who believe there should be another generation of translators and other language professionals. People who want to collaborate to make it happen. Educators and Industry leaders will exchange views on what the next generation of students need to know to enter the work force better prepared. How do we entice talented young people to choose translation or interpreting as a career? How do we provide internships for them during their education?
The NextGen conference will not be limited to the major languages in North America (French, Spanish, and English). Far from it. There will be a plenary session focused on Indigenous languages and the need for trained community interpreters, especially for healthcare and justice.
The opening session will start at 6 pm on Thursday, October 5th, followed by dinner in small groups of people who do not yet know each other. Friday will be a sequence of plenary presentations. Saturday there will be four parallel sessions. Sunday is left open to explore the beautiful Monterey Bay area on your own if you can stay. On Monday, October 9th, we will have an activity that includes a boat excursion and a send-off to those who will be continuing on to LocWorld50, only an hour’s drive away.
Regardless of whether you are familiar with the 1968 classic song “Do you know the way to San Jose”, please visit the LocWorld50 page and listen to the original lyrics composed and performed by the up-and-coming artist, Sophie Blair, using the 1968 notes, to which we have applied for a non-exclusive license. Who says translation conferences can’t be fun? Sophie’s lyrics even include a subtle reference to an alternative conference more in line with the Always Full Automation vision of the future. Regardless of your vision of the future, human language is amazing, and we can all be friends.
Please join us in Monterey for the NextGen conference!
On June 8th at 10 am Malmö time, there was a plenary session on “hybrid intelligence” and the “language industry”. Please see the photo I took from the audience. From left to right you see: Georg Kirchner Alon Lavie Jaap van der Meer Peng Wang (moderator)
Predictably, there was a lot of discussion about ChatGPT and its possible impact on the language services sector.
Mostly the panelists were cautious in making predictions. However, Mr. van der Meer, the head of TAUS, made the following claim:
“The translation industry will disappear.”
He even gave a timeline: “within ten years”.
He referred to a 2021 article he published in Multilingual Magazine. In this article he notes a tension between traditional translation by professional translators (expensive) and raw machine translation (nearly free). And at LocWorld he restated his position that these two methods of production will not continue to co-exist. He neglected to acknowledge that also in 2021, Multilingual Magazine published a rebuttal in which Christopher Kurz and I argue, among other things, that these two methods of production can indeed co-exist and will. Obviously, one view of the future will turn out to be right and the other wrong. You can download and read the article by Mr. van der Meer and the rebuttal (https://www.ttt.org/translation-economics-and-rebuttal/) and decide for yourself which position is more convincing. Or you can simply wait ten years and observe what happens. 😃
FIT does not have the luxury of waiting it out passively. We need to state our position and get it out to the same people who attended LocWorld Malmö. Many of them are wondering about the future of human translators. I know because I was there and spoke with them.
The presentations at LocWorld Malmö were not all bleak from the perspective of a professional translator.
A very different vision of the future of professional human translators was given in an Unconference session later that day by Scott Schwalbach of Amazon. Scott works in the translation department as a manager and has a much more optimistic view of the future of the profession. He emphasized the importance of treating translators like people and helping them better use their creative skills and receive appropriate compensation. I discussed with Scott the possibility of him making a statement at the beginning of the FIT North America NextGen conference in October: https://fit-northamerica-rc.org/fit-na-next-gen-conference/.
To better think of Scott as a person, like he thinks of us as people, please see his photo with me from June 8th.
The premise of the FIT-NA NextGen conference is that there will be professional translators in ten years and that we need to attract young people to the profession and educate them well. Although not obvious from the TAUS conference website, what do you think the premise behind Mr. van der Meer’s conference will be?
By the way, Jaap and I have known each other for many years. Our views seem to have become increasingly divergent. It is probably time for us to sit down face to face and talk about use cases and risk analysis, especially since he made a puzzling statement at the end of the panel discussion: “AI is stupid”.
In order to encourage people to choose to attend the FIT-NA event the first week of October, I spoke with Ulrich Henes, founder of the LocWorld conference series, yesterday in Malmö. See his photo: https://locworld.com/about-us/your-locworld-team/.
Interestingly, there will be a LocWorld conference in San Jose the week following the FIT-NA NextGen conference.
The idea I discussed with Ulrich yesterday is the possibility that LocWorld will mention the FIT-NA NextGen conference in one of their broadcast email messages about the San Jose LocWorld event. People would be alerted to the possibility of arriving early for the LocWorld event so they can attend part or all of the FIT-NA event (October 5-7). On Sunday, October 8th, they can visit the beautiful Monterey Bay area and socialize with NextGen attendees who stay over the weekend. Then, on Monday, October 9th, they can make their way from Monterey to San Jose.
We can even tell them, “Yes, we know the way to San Jose”, which should speak to those who have heard the 1968 song “Do you know the way to San Jose?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqWt49o7R-k). Who says making ourselves visible to the rest of the language services sector, especially localization companies, can’t be fun?
There is much more I could report concerning the LocWorld Malmö event, but I hope that the above will give the reader a feeling for the discussions (and polarization) that are going on in the sector.
We in FIT believe that the future for professional human translators is bright. How can we get our message out to rest of the language services sector and to the general public, so they hear both sides of the story?
Submitted by Alan Melby, Chair of the FIT North America regional center and Co-chair of the FIT Technology committee
