Google AI will REPLACE Translators!
12The sheer amount of arrogance from AI bros are genuinely astonishing.
"RIP translator jobs."
I apologize on behalf of all Indonesians for this stupidity. This is the Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrating AI translation conversations between someone who speaks English and someone who speaks Spanish.
I understand that there's a big discourse of people hating localizers, and I don't like those localizers either, but regardless of who does the job, human translation is still necessary to provide genuine context between two languages, because some contexts are totally missing when you use machine translations.
Some Indonesians provided excellent examples of when machine translations are totally out of whack. For example, Indonesian machine translations translate RED cameras to red cameras, as in a camera that is colored red, not a camera with the brand RED. Gemini managed to distinguish the difference. So, good on you, Google, but this is still ridiculous.
Horrible machine translations are especially very prominent on subtitles. This person from the movie The Gifted is named Grace, but the machine translation translates the name Grace to Grace as in "She's graced with bad translations."
This scene from I assume is one of the Arrow-verse shows has the characters saying toast, but the machine translation translates toast as in the bread toast.
This scene from the 2014 movie Noah has Russel Crowe saying that he's Noah, but the machine translation translates it as No Ah, separated, with the word No as in Noah translating to No as in "No, this Noah translation is not correct."
You might say that it'll get better in a year or two, but we've had machine translations for decades, and it's still missing out context. I recently watched the movie Companion. It's a good movie, but the Indonesian subtitle that I downloaded online is clearly machine translated and never manually checked, because the characters end up speaking absolute gibberish that only barely made sense.
The human touch is still necessary with these translations. They just need to come from actually competent people rather than entitled localizers or arrogant AI bros.