AI and translation

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Humanic
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AI and translation

Post by Humanic »

I have been thinking lately about if it will ever be possible to have Tibetan texts translated accurately by AI.

Are the days of the lotsawa numbered?
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Zhen Li
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Re: AI and translation

Post by Zhen Li »

It will be able to translate accurately, but there is greater value in a human translator—this is why they still exist for languages that have long been translated by machines. Humans can more accurately tell what words sound right to the ear. So, a human translated text will always end up being nicer to read. One thing that also sets computers and humans apart is verse. Those who know anything about poetry will be aware that AI writes very bad poetry, it can't count syllables, detect metre, or rhyme well—these are the reserve of humans, so far.

As for professional translation for high-resource languages, like French to English, translators are still employed. Translation memory tools that they use do provide machine translation of whatever text they are working on, but that is only used as a quick reference or look-up tool. In a way, a machine translation can act as a kind of quick jog to the memory about unfamiliar terms, or help with syntax for a translator, but is never a substitute for human composition.
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Kim O'Hara
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Re: AI and translation

Post by Kim O'Hara »

:good:

There's also the issue of background knowledge of the subject. AI knows the words but, in a sense, knows nothing about their meaning. When it's a simple matter of translating 'noir' to black' it will be okay but it doesn't know what either 'noir' or 'black' look like or feel like, or what their connotations are, so it will miss the occasions where a different word would have been better.
And that's a very mundane instance from two closely related languages. Extrapolate that to translating highly technical material between two unrelated languages and two unrelated cultures, and we really do need people - ideally, subject experts with an excellent grasp of both languages.

:namaste:
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Zhen Li
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Re: AI and translation

Post by Zhen Li »

I came across this very thoughtful and interesting video on this topic a few days ago:


My comment was that while GPT-4 is quite useful for my work in terms of being a kind of rapid dictionary and a way to get the syntax for tricky sentences, it would be really much better if you could feed it a dictionary or glossary as a dataset. It can get the syntax of a sentence and identify common Buddhist terminology but doesn't recognise more of the specialised terminology. While DeepL has the feature of custom dictionaries, it doesn't have this feature for Chinese yet.

Honestly, I mainly use a translation memory tool (OmegaT). This way, I don't have to worry about inconsistencies in translation (although I have internalised standard terms for most of the terminology). But if DeepL or some other tool could do the input, that would really speed up the process.

In any case, a human is still needed to give texts the right "flavour." It's a matter of taste, as the video suggests, but I personally can't yet leave an AI or machine translation as-is. If anything, it's a useful tool for now. If it could have more feedback from the user, and mimick their style and terminology, that would be great, and I think Microsoft is working on something like that for Office with "CoPilot."
Vasana
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Re: AI and translation

Post by Vasana »

Good question.

I'm not knowledgeable about this but it would be interesting to know to what degree we already have something generalizable as AI within things like google translate and how the next gen of AI would differ.

I would imagine lots of human oversight and review would still be needed. Style guides etc. I imagine if purpose built apps were built, it could at least help speed up many of the processes involved in translation.
'When thoughts arise, recognise them clearly as your teacher'— Gampopa
'When alone, examine your mind, when among others, examine your speech'.— Atisha
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Zhen Li
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Re: AI and translation

Post by Zhen Li »

Vasana wrote: Thu May 11, 2023 2:26 pm I'm not knowledgeable about this but it would be interesting to know to what degree we already have something generalizable as AI within things like google translate and how the next gen of AI would differ.
I'm not sure if he addresses that in that video or in another one, but somewhere the same person (Tom Gally) went through how they differ. Essentially Google Translate and DeepL translate sentence by sentence (or, I think, it takes into account the neighbouring sentences). They are essentially lexicon and rule-based translations—e.g. if it sees X, it outputs Y, unless Xa, then Yb, etc. GPT-4 on the other hand is a large language model, so it takes patterns it has seen between datasets and provides a probabilistically likely response. Therefore, if it doesn't have the precise rule for a certain string of syntax, it could generalise based on other languages or how the language acts in other contexts.

Tom Gally gives a good example of this with regard to pronouns, which are not used in certain contexts in many languages. In Japanese, you can give a whole paragraph without pronouns, only introducing the subject at the end of the paragraph, and the reader can intuitively pickup what is being said. But Google Translate or DeepL will assume pronouns: one sentence might have "he," the next "she" or "we," and so forth. But because ChatGPT takes the whole context into account, it can know what pronoun to use, and see how context might change the way a passage would be rendered into English.
Vasana wrote: Thu May 11, 2023 2:26 pm I would imagine lots of human oversight and review would still be needed. Style guides etc. I imagine if purpose built apps were built, it could at least help speed up many of the processes involved in translation.
Part of this is possible with DeepL premium, which allows you to have a custom dictionary for use with the app. If it were possible to provide custom rules and dictionaries to Chat GPT, it would definitely work, but at the moment, I think non-specialist users are not really able to manage to set that up.

With OmegaT, if you have access to a premium translation programme, you can insert an API, and it can provide a machine translation in the app, but these are not very good for classical languages, I found. If it creates output you want to insert into your text, you can do it with two clicks. If there comes to be a GPT feature, that would help; however, for now, it is sufficient to have it open in a separate window. Anyway, the most important thing with translation is accuracy, but also readability, so I can't foresee human supervision ever being irrelevant—these are productivity tools that will speed up, but not replace, human translators.
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Re: AI and translation

Post by Vasana »

Thanks for sharing your knowledge on this, Zhen Li.

Let's hope that in the future, translation and AI can be as complimentary as possible. Who knows, maybe it will help weed out problematic glosses or provide alternatives when a particular translation doesn't gel with someone or when there are difficult points.

slightly off-topic, but maybe an AI Bot trained on dharma literature could also end up being a decent tutor/assistant for many people without access to a teacher for whatever reason.

Medical accuracy aside, Studies have shown that people find chat-gpt more empathic in comparison to real-world doctors. I'm sure some people will find Buddha-bots quite useful.

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Zhen Li
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Re: AI and translation

Post by Zhen Li »

Vasana wrote: Fri May 12, 2023 2:32 pm slightly off-topic, but maybe an AI Bot trained on dharma literature could also end up being a decent tutor/assistant for many people without access to a teacher for whatever reason.

Medical accuracy aside, Studies have shown that people find chat-gpt more empathic in comparison to real-world doctors. I'm sure some people will find Buddha-bots quite useful.
I think there are already LLM models trained on the Bible and Christian texts that can answer people's questions about Christianity. I think there can be great advantage to this, if we can feed an LLM with the Buddhist texts, it will be very interesting to ask questions and see what it says—keeping in mind that it's all probabilistic. Of course, Chat GPT is not really emphatic, but people get that perception because, probabilistically, it knows what users are more likely to like to hear. So, people need to understand what these things are, and not think they are actually "intelligent."
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Re: AI and translation

Post by Malcolm »

Humanic wrote: Fri Mar 17, 2023 2:59 am I have been thinking lately about if it will ever be possible to have Tibetan texts translated accurately by AI.

Are the days of the lotsawa numbered?
No. In particular, native Tibetan compositions. Tibetan is a synonym poor language, in general. Many words functioning completely differently in different contexts. Then there are colloquial terms, which very from region to region.
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