Science & Technology
Pro Interpreters vs. AI Challenge: Who Translates Faster and Better? | WIRED
AI has been threatening everyone’s jobs, and that includes translation. Professional interpreters Barry Slaughter Olsen and Walter Krochma take on an AI speech translator named Kudo to see how its translation compares to that of a human. Barry and Walter test the AI on its ability to translate not only the words being said, but…
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Brian Williams
June 19, 2023 at 3:16 pm
If AI is threatening your job it wasn’t very important to begin with
Steech
June 19, 2023 at 3:43 pm
What a pathetically ridiculous comment, thanks for sharing your ignorance with the world.
Jz L
June 19, 2023 at 7:20 pm
Despite what people put on their resumes or LinkedIn profiles, 99.9% of jobs aren’t very important. That’s why wage stagnation has been going on for decades, yet is still a huge portion of the cost of products and services. And yet, if no one had any income capitalism would collapse without the consumers.
Kevin Luo
June 19, 2023 at 3:20 pm
The risk is too high in diplomatic negotiations, and a human needs to make sure it is correct.
Irina Golovina
June 19, 2023 at 3:27 pm
Great overview! Would’ve loved to hear the full records of original speech, interpreters’ and AI’s interpretation to get a better idea though. Do you plan to publish it at some point?
kinkajou
June 19, 2023 at 4:48 pm
listening to this as a data scientist student ✍🏽✍🏽
Dalli Serge
June 19, 2023 at 5:28 pm
What headset is Barry, the 1st interpreter, wearing?
Patt O'Neill
June 19, 2023 at 5:36 pm
Hmmmm. AI’s are basically bureaucrats — unemotional, literal, robotic and intrinsically sociopathic. I hate videos that are AI narrated. Some of it is just awful.
ConcernedCitizen
June 19, 2023 at 5:41 pm
AI will never be able to be smarter than the user providing the input into it
Gentle Ken
June 19, 2023 at 6:17 pm
As a speaker of Korean, I can tell you that AI and online translators will never be as good as people for translating Korean into English perfectly. As a teacher here, I can tell when a student has used Papago (the most popular translation app/website). It has terrible trouble with subject pronouns because they are not always written in Korean so it guesses what the subject may be and mixes them up in sentences. Also given that, like other languages, there may not be a direct translation between phrases and words, meaning it can make a mistake with them too. At the moment, it’s about 70% effective, but that 30% means that it’s very obvious when someone has used a translator.
Amica Aranearum
June 19, 2023 at 6:18 pm
Where the AI seems to suffer the most is prosody. The AI interpretation of King Felipe’s speech does not sound compassionate or reassuring; it’s actually a little _unnerving_ to listen to.
Twn Twrs
June 19, 2023 at 7:53 pm
Which, ironically, makes it more accurate since Felipe’s compassion and reassurance is a put-on as befits a parasitic unelected aristocrat (son of an elephant hunter appointed by Franco who revived the monarchy) steeped in privilege for whom “his” people’s suffering is an abstraction that he’ll never experience.
Jim Leonard
June 19, 2023 at 6:21 pm
Well, AI certainly helped summarize this video faster than watching it: “AI speech translation can be useful in informal situations with low consequences for mistakes. However, for critical and high-stakes scenarios like courtrooms, medical interactions, and diplomatic negotiations, human interpreters remain essential due to their ability to process complex nuances, metaphorical language, and ensure accurate communication.”
ZE-MO
June 19, 2023 at 7:35 pm
I don’t understand why people watch all these Fibonacci levels and stress themselves out with trading when they can just deposit coins in reliable projects like Wixpool!
Miyase Dural
June 19, 2023 at 7:35 pm
Are you still just holding coins? Guys, what are you doing? Wixpool has been around for almost a year!
Kerem
June 19, 2023 at 7:39 pm
Guys, why aren’t you talking about Wixpool?
Rachel Feldman
June 19, 2023 at 8:41 pm
I would love to see this with Japanese. Subjects get left out all the time, euphemism is everywhere, and social context is king. How would a computer do with that?
Rasen
June 20, 2023 at 8:11 pm
it would simply fail miserably and either be nonsensical or very confidently wrong (actual j->e translator speaking)
noNewFriends
June 19, 2023 at 9:44 pm
Illuminating
Treezy DCM
June 19, 2023 at 11:21 pm
Excellent segment I worked as translator of 19c documents in the past and I wonder what would ai do. Google translate was and isn’t accurate enough in professional circles or environments. I’d love a segment focusing on translation of medieval, early modern, and 19c, pleasssssssse.
Felix Ramos Jr. Spanish Interpreter
June 19, 2023 at 11:28 pm
Great job guy’s..
TheOneCleanHippy
June 20, 2023 at 12:27 am
I’m an American living in China. AI-powered translation apps have made my life significantly easier. That being said, there is a reason why they did this with English/Spanish. When you start doing harder or more significantly different languages like Chinese to English or lesser known languages like Estonian to Navajo, the quality of the translation takes a nosedive. It will continue to get better and better very quickly but it isn’t quite there yet, especially when you get into metaphorical language or idioms.
meowverwhelmed
June 20, 2023 at 1:03 am
It shpuld be called Artificial Stupidity.
Just Passing Through
June 20, 2023 at 2:57 am
Let AI interpret Trump
Ratchetto Gee
June 20, 2023 at 5:28 am
though i love learning foreign languages, unfortunately i dont think there is a future for the professions of translation and interpretation. thats not to say demand will be zero or they they will never be needed, I just think AI being 80-90% as good as a human is enough to decrease the demand for these professions massively. and lets also not pretend like human interpreters are flawless either. if AI makes mistakes, it would be foolish to think humans don’t.
Liangzx
June 20, 2023 at 6:14 am
so far theres no AI that can cover all languages well, so translator and intepreter still stay
KΛVIП キート
June 20, 2023 at 6:16 am
It’s a tool to replace our way to interpret things easily and efficiently
Duke Burgundy
June 20, 2023 at 7:34 am
AI doesn’t care about emotions, AI only understands facts. Human emotions are unnecessary where facts are concerned. 90% of “jobs” humans are forced to do, are antiquated, redundant and could be done in a quarter of the time by an AI . AI could make the world a much better place, but humans will never allow that.
John Lewis
June 20, 2023 at 10:11 am
Kudo uses software that translates in real time and is backed up my human translators. AI has not tackled real time translation, however, and if you wanted to reassure people that “AI isn’t coming for your jobs”, this would be an ideal test. Translation tasks for documents and text are already giving way to AI Large Language Models, like ChatGPT. They are very accurate for this task and extremely fast. It will not be a long time before LLMs can handle the speed requirements for real time translation, but it’s dishonest to use this as the benchmark. It’s an extremely small segment of the translation business market. Wired should have done better.
Inside Interpreting
June 20, 2023 at 12:52 pm
A great and well-informed video (although professional conference interpreting started in 1919, not Nuremberg). The final analysis is spot on. AI interpreting is going to widen access to interpreting and might help professionals but it is not even nearly a replacement and, based on current algorithms, cannot be one.
passatboi
June 20, 2023 at 6:34 pm
Why didn’t they give it something with terrible grammar or a heavy accent or proper nouns or toponyms?
Ayana J
June 20, 2023 at 7:29 pm
Barry, this is brilliant, am going to share! Bravo!!
Delon Serino
June 20, 2023 at 8:16 pm
In the human’s closing statements, that’s what a boomer would say. For balance and fairness, you should also have had the AI explain their thoughts as well.
Stud Gerbil
June 20, 2023 at 8:39 pm
The bigger concern is knowing whether it’s AI or human, not the translation per se. If the intended listeners do not know, that could be an issue. We are used to being deceived by public speakers already, but this makes it doubly bad, whether it’s a speech, news article, photograph or video. AI is indeed a tool, and any tool will always be used by those in power to gain more control. This has always been the case.
Infranco Personal Training
June 21, 2023 at 9:06 am
AI may not be 100% ready but the fact that it’s already basically good enough and that it’s rapidly getting better tells me that nobody’s job is safe 😭
Schrödingers Katze
June 22, 2023 at 2:33 pm
But the point of this video was, that it’s not good enough for most purposes. It get’s the denotation of the words right, but struggles with everything else. So you can use it in informal contexts when there are no big consequences, like when you’re talking to an exchange student and struggle with the language. But otherwise, it can only maybe be used one day to assist human interpreters, but it really doesn’t look like it can ever replace them.
Infranco Personal Training
June 22, 2023 at 6:20 pm
@Schrödingers Katze Im aware. Like I said in my comment, it’s still not 100% ready. This technology is only getting better so I wouldn’t be surprised if it does eventually replace interpreters. Nobody really knows how long that will take though. 10 years, 50, 100.. idk
Schrödingers Katze
June 22, 2023 at 6:53 pm
@Infranco Personal Training Not anywhere in the near future, if at all. It can barely do anything well, even if it gets a lot better, it still wouldn’t be able to get it done as well as humans. To reach that, it would have to get some very good understanding of things like intonation, emotion, culture or connotations. Just to name a few examples. But at the moment it sometimes even gets grammar wrong sometimes and messes up completely when the speaker makes a pause in the middle of their sentence. It’s just not realistic that we would see it replace humans. Certainly not during our lifetime.
Infranco Personal Training
June 22, 2023 at 7:51 pm
@Schrödingers Katze I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens
Ghost 94
June 23, 2023 at 5:12 am
@Schrödingers Katze yeah but it can train for 1000 of years in a week duration
and 1000s of bot will learns and get better by seconds
we humans cant do that
Schrödingers Katze
June 23, 2023 at 5:29 am
@Ghost 94But I doubt it will learn anything else than denotation, grammar and maybe a tiny little bit of connotation. Or do we have the technology to teach it the rest? What should that even look like? Will the AI become concious and feel emotions all of a sudden?
Ghost 94
June 23, 2023 at 5:56 am
@Schrödingers Katze But I doubt it will learn anything else than denotation, grammar and maybe a tiny little bit of connotation. Or do we have the technology to teach it the rest?
yes 100% in 10 years this would be a joke
Will the AI become concious and feel emotions all of a sudden?
we don’t know
but google Emulation and let me know what u think
Marcus Quintus
June 21, 2023 at 9:17 am
People will always prefer a human’s mistake over a computer’s.
Ghost 94
June 23, 2023 at 5:14 am
wait 5 to 10 years
you wont even know whos human
BaconSky
June 21, 2023 at 11:08 am
Remember 2017? “Ai will never be able to translate language to an useful level” – almost every translator. 2023 – “it will never be able to translate the sentiment”. 2025 – AI can translate at least as good as the best of us
Rafael Ramos
June 21, 2023 at 12:32 pm
AI’s always lack the most important thing about us. Humanity
Ghost 94
June 23, 2023 at 5:16 am
BS
you know even today many humans prefer Aivtubers instead of humans
Peter Chin
June 21, 2023 at 9:03 pm
as a professional interpreter, I actually look forward on how AI can help me do better at my job
Shivan Shivan
June 22, 2023 at 4:08 am
An educative video
ProjectElf
June 22, 2023 at 4:37 am
The real question is why is that guy speaking so fast in the first place
David Rubio
June 22, 2023 at 10:49 am
It’s not yet there, but its a matter of time.
glossaria2
June 22, 2023 at 1:28 pm
I’d love to see how Barry would do on the speed test speech if he had Kudo’s running translation in front of him *while* he did his translation. I’d be curious to see if it would help, or simply be a distraction.
Petter
June 22, 2023 at 3:27 pm
In this video: Two old men defending their 40 year experiences against an AI that hadn’t been trained at all and used what it knew. However… Lets say you train the AI properly….
Ghost 94
June 23, 2023 at 4:53 am
there would never be a human transater 2.0
but there would hundreds of versions of machine translation in the future (which would inevitably beat the humans)
Falk Lumo
June 23, 2023 at 4:14 pm
Why not compare against chatGPT, nobody cares about KUDO at this moment in time!
I tried it and chatGPT seemed to do a MUCH better job. E.g., it translated:
“They confronted the initial onslaught of the virus in extreme situations, including overwhelming moments in some of our hospitals”.
I.e., “overwhelming moments” rather than “overflow” which KUDO came up with. Etc.pp. I did the whole translation and it transferred the emotions correctly as far as I can tell.
So again: Why didn’t WIRED compare against the state of the art in AI, or at least replaced “AI” by “KUDO” in the title? As it stands, this is clickbait journalism, I am sorry to say!!
GrumpyDog
June 23, 2023 at 8:54 pm
Doesn’t seem like they’re using the best AI translator available.. Also, this video just focuses on pretty much the LAST places of the puzzle, which AI is struggling, in this regard..
In a year or 2, or maybe 5, either way, these problems WILL be solved.. Then what?
Lena
June 24, 2023 at 6:39 am
AI still routinely struggles with and comes up with nonsense sequences for more synthetic languages or languages with a more complex sentence structure. It would be nice to finally see at least one study that is not done on English or Spanish.
Polyglot Ava
June 24, 2023 at 3:08 pm
I believe the true potential will be realized when we, as interpreters, can leverage AI to enhance our interpretation. If the AI can precisely identify all complex terminology for me, it would free up cognitive resources, allowing me to make on-the-spot decisions to either trust the AI or opt for a more suitable phrasing during human interpretation.
BusketPosket
June 26, 2023 at 9:27 pm
This was an amazing video! I hope you show the strengths/weaknesses with translating lesser-spoken or grammatically complex languages, or even explore whether AI is to the point where signed languages can have the same level of interpretation (or, if not, why the heck not?)
As a linguist, I worry about tech bros and popsci blogs running with this notion that language is a static and fully observable thing that you can pop out of one mouth, run through an algorithm, then pop it whole-cloth into someone else’s eyes or ears. So much of communication is metalinguistic, and we barely understand the mechanisms ourselves. It’s a black-box programming a black-box.