Professional translation in a pre-Singularity world (it’s all about the readers) Mikel L. Forcada Universitat d’Alacant (Spain) Prompsit Language Engineering (Elx, Spain) European Association for Machine Translation

All translation is communication Getting the target-language reader to understand the message, and to (re)act as expected —the purpose of the translation— implies getting in their shoes: expectations beliefs feelings cultural context social context … Can a machine get in your shoes without a model of you?

Professional translation Translators are professionals that are good at that, but variably so. They use: approximate, often intuitive models of readers a reasonable understanding of purpose: sometimes explicitly formulated often gleaned / read between the lines / guessed the customer often has only an approximate idea Fulfillment of purpose? →often a rudimentary approximation: customers coming back for more

Machine translation Current machine translation does not have explicit access to a model of the reader… … nor feedback from that model or negotiation with it. It is therefore hard to code purpose (as it includes the reaction of readers). Current approach (neural, statistical MT): producing text that works by mimicking good references (references that presumably worked well in the past).

Readers of machine translation But who reads raw machine translation? Professional translators: most likely to postedit it. Purpose: being easy to postedit into text which fulfils the customer’s purpose. Ordinary people: to make sense of a text across a language barrier. Purpose: being easy to understand as is. The requirements of both tasks are different! But ordinary people get used to dealing with noisy, non-native, non- grammatical content. MT’ed content is not an exception.

PT already being replaced? Professional translators are already being replaced (no need to wait for a Kurzweilian singularity) in some applications. In fact, they have never been (and will never be) part of some applications (e.g. translated web browsing).

Implicit modelling of readers MT can get better at using rudimentary ways to guess purpose (which means modelling readers implicitly). It may replace PT where intricate reader modelling is not necessary as behaviour can be taken for granted: E.g. translated instructions that will be followed by an obedient reader that has decided or has been instructed to do so. In the future, it may actually negotiate and interact with readers to build an approximate model.

And now, back to the original question… So, will all translators be replaced before the Singularity? MT will get much better at implicitly modelling some types of readers / reading situations: PT already gradually being replaced. MT still has a long way to go when modelling some types of readers / reading situations. PT still needed there.