We have already discussed
many times about "natural" advantages that machine translation may
be upon us, translators made up of mere "flesh and bone". Their
lives are finite and decaying against the colossal golem that threatens to take
over the industry, and that finally makes us obsolete human.
We become old and dusty
VCRs of the future? Do new generations of children cyborg regarded us one
day as today's children watch 8-track cartridges? I can almost imagine
their expressions bewildered and sad, reflecting unnecessarily, trying to
understand what we were, "sacks of meat". A "404
error" flashing in their "mental screens" no conclusive result.
Then, what have we that
can sustain us against the dreaded machine? The answer: improvisation,
which is the core of our unpredictable nature.
The human ability to
extrapolate two pieces of information unattached uniting them, achieving a new
possible meaning. Such is the gift of creation, in some sense.
Therefore, that machines
can not be poets (or only Dadaist poets in the best of cases).Yes, you can
randomize, even making their own mistakes, but never on purpose. They are
not programmed to make mistakes, even if they do it once in a while, but only
while your code is perfect (from 0.1 to 0.2), and never with a creative purpose
"in mind".
Improvisation,
connection of separate groups of information to "understand" is, for
now, a unique human ability. The machine knows or does not know. And
when you don't know, you need a new contribution that includes that
consolidated juxtaposition of ideas in a new concept or phrase.
It is like trying to
have a philosophical conversation with Alexei or Siri. They may have some
quite ingenious answers to predefined questions, but when you ask them
something completely realigned, may simply not calculate and respond something
coherent. This is where we, humans, are still strong.
Last year in Seoul, a
human translators team defeated a machine translation engine with artificial
intelligence in a competition organized by the International Association
of translators and interpreters (IAPTI), showing that "meat bag"
will still we remain firm in the business. How they managed our
underdeveloped species achieve that, they wonder? Well, it seems that machine
translation was not capable of making sense of the specific combinations of
words that had no entry, which gave results a translation without sense where
their human counterparts could deduce meaning through the use of
imagination and some risks.
