By Nisha Anandani
What comes to mind when someone asks you about the future of translation? Robots? Machine tools? No paperwork? Machines doing it completely by themselves? To answer that, it helps to look at where translation has been, where it is, and where it is going.
Translation in the past
The word "translation" comes from a Latin term meaning "to bring or carry across". A related term comes from the Ancient Greek metaphrasis, "to speak across" - from which "metaphrase", a word-for-word translation, was born. These terms have been at the heart of translation theories throughout history.
Translation services have had a remarkable impact on the world: learning a language gives people the opportunity to understand the meanings, habits, and ways of living of several cultures. And while translation and interpreting are sometimes used interchangeably, translation converts written text from a source language, while interpretation does so orally.
What did translation look like in past ages? Hundreds of papers all around, two or three dictionaries, multiple experts and professionals working on the same project. To be a translator then, you needed expertise, degrees, certificates, and years of experience. Times have changed - and so has the translation industry.
Translation in the present
Today, AI tools work alongside the expert knowledge of the human brain. Purely human translations still exist, but AI is used because it is far faster - it can translate a thousand words in a minute, sometimes seconds. But is it always efficient, and is the grammar correct every time? No. AI tools often give the literal meaning of words: you can sometimes figure out the sentence from the result, but it won't give you the exact sentence. That is where human translators are still needed.
So in the current generation, translation tools are useful, faster, and efficient up to a point - but they cannot wave off the years of experience and accuracy a human brings. And just as they stumble on literal meaning, AI tools still fail at translating poems, phrases, and idioms.
Translation in the future
A lot has changed already - we can translate documents in a fraction of a second, though accuracy is still not enough. With brilliant people and evolving technology, the impact on the translation industry will be major. Translators will still be needed, though perhaps not for the tiniest documents, and accuracy may keep increasing. Translator jobs may decrease over time - but jobs in bilingual programming could shoot up.
Why? Bilingual programmers can build applications that include not only grammar points but also the meanings and usage of words in particular sentences. Each language has multiple words and ways of saying the same sentence: "lead" can mean leading a group or a career path; "read" is both present and past tense. AI tools miss such minute nuances. In the future, experienced translators and language experts can share this knowledge with programmers to make AI tools genuinely efficient.
A win-win either way
The future is unpredictable, but with growing technology, things like these are predictable. Translation jobs will not completely disappear - machines make mistakes when unscanned - though they may decrease over time. Either way, it is a win-win:
- High demand in the IT field, plus high demand for the language experts needed to make it work
- Anyone and everyone will be able to understand different languages and nuances using these AI tools
