Could the increasing quality of machine translation discourage learners from tackling Asian languages?

An interesting and eye-opening debate is taking place online at the Australian-based Lowy Institute for International Policy blog. Although the blog is called The Interpreter, it deals with all types of foreign policy issues, especially as they concern Australia.

The blog’s purpose is to open up debate, and a major discussion has been going on since late October about the usefulness for Australians of learning Asian languages.

Australian business is closely linked to Asia, so some participants feel Australians should be mastering as many Asian languages as possible, especially Chinese. However, others doubt the personal and corporate return on investment represented by this time-consuming endeavor.

Machine translation comes up as a possible solution to the problem – or, at least, as a possible deterrent to Australians thinking of studying Asian languages. “Do advances in machine translation reduce the need for Australians to learn Asian languages?” asked one participant.

A “Reader Riposte,” points out the progress in automated translation, notably Google’s statistical-based system. The writer, however, clearly notes the limits of Google’s translation platforms:

“I'd argue that because it's dependent on a finite bunch of bilingual words and phrases, machine translation as we understand it today will never have the flexibility or skill at interpreting context of a human. Machine translation is excellent at getting the (somewhat garbled) gist of a foreign language document, and even better with smaller words and phrases, but for face-to-face conversations, not to mention official documents or business meetings, a human thinking on their feet and with knowledge of idioms and the cultural context couldn't be matched by a machine at this stage — and possibly never will be, without genuine artificial intelligence.” (Aidan Dullard)

He also explains that his tests of Google Translate for English-Japanese or English-Chinese have led to “some very weird results.”

Betty Carlson

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