AI ML translation

[Jack]

there have been a number of discussions in the GR J-Lit group and on our discord channel about Japanese books in translation, almost always from Amazon listings, that have been iffy. Translator names that can not be identified by published record or if the books have been ML translated.

I thought it would be useful to open a discussion thread for your thoughts on (usually adaptive) Artificial Intelligence Machine Translation.

Here is a starter discussion from the Books on Asia podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

[Jack]

Anther area of AI use in generating literature...

"FOCUS:Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world"
(KYODO NEWS - Feb 5, 2024)
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/20...

"The novel by 33-year-old Rie Kudan, titled Tokyo-to Dojo-to ("Sympathy Tower Tokyo") is set in the Japanese capital in the not-so-distant future when generative AI has become ubiquitous, and took the 170th Akutagawa Prize for up-and-coming authors in January."

[Alison]

Jack wrote: "Anther area of AI use in generating literature...

"FOCUS:Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world"
(KYODO NEWS - Feb 5, 2024)
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/20......"

It's up for a translated release in English in 2025. I haven't looked to see if a translator has been announced. Jesse Kirkwood? 😅 (I kid.) There must be some internal strife among those who might translate.

[Jack]

This is an older Wikipedia article on the history of machine translation (MT). It is lacking updates for post 2010.
My experience in MT is probably with Expert Systems although I do not know what is behind the current auto translate functions on various services like YouTube or what is implimented in Goggle and Apple translate. There are also auto translate functions in widely used software packages like Microsoft Word.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histo...

I think the progression of machine translations methods are:
Rule Base (expert) systems
Statistical Machine Translations systems
Neural Net based machine translation systems

I think the progression from here has been various generations/iterations of AI machine translation systems.
I will add more to the thread as I read more on the subject.

Please feel free to add to thread or bring up comments, thoughts or issues.
Thank you,
Jack, co-mod

[Carol]

This is a starter article, to be sure, but it's from Jan 2024, so reflects current state a little better than anything more than a year old, I think.

https://slator.com/state-of-ai-in-lit...

and this from The Atlantic, The Last Frontier of Machine Translation, is undated, but the header says, "9 months" ago.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techno...

Practically speaking, my concern is that there already is a significant percentage of readers who don't "trust" translated literature to be accurate. It only takes encountering one or two clunky translations to turn someone off of reading translations at all, and if no good translator will take post-editing gigs (and why would they), the market of readers willing to pay for translated lit might shrink further, albeit over time.