September 30 is celebrated as International Translation Day and this is a good opportunity to reflect on the status and condition of translation today.
With technology, translation has got a massive boost, but that is not always thought of as a substitute for words that bring cultures together.
Translation is not a new phenomenon. Since the second century BCE, there exists recorded translation of religious and creative texts. Religious texts were routinely translated into various languages as they were carried across civilisations.
Translators face many linguistic and cultural challenges. They must constantly make choices regarding the meaning of words or phrases when used in different contexts:
Do they make sense literally? Do they have to be explained in another way? What impact does changing the words have on the text?
While literary translation already has all these challenges, it is even more so in legal or medical translation where the implications of the wrong choice of words could lead to crucial real world problems.
Today, much of this is being addressed by artificial intelligence.
There are many applications which provide end to end translations into many of the world’s languages. Entire speeches, reports and documents can be translated in a matter of minutes.
Speed, cost, the ability to multitask by outsourcing translation and maintaining privacy are considerable advantages to using technology for translation.
However, there are many obstacles to machine translation as of now. These include the fact that words in the original (source) text can have multiple meanings; the grammatical structure could be different but that is not reflected in the translation; pronouns in the source and target language could be differently used.
Most of all, there are words in all languages which are essentially untranslatable. It is up to human to see how to substitute and lend meaning in such a situation.
Translation can be seen as a science, but it is more of an art. Language is creative and its use changes with time, as all languages evolve and meanings change. Technology may not be able to keep up with these changes, at least, not yet.
Having said that, machine translation is perhaps the only solution to the globalised world’s expectations of access to knowledge and information.
The popular anecdote of a German company negotiating with a Korean one and signing papers in English is the quintessential example of how a common language which belongs to neither is used to document agreements.
Technology may here help both parties to use their own languages to some extent.
Instinctively, we dismiss technology in writing and communication, thinking of them as basically human acts. But the world now is too interconnected and networked to rely entirely on human knowledge and skills.
Trusting machines to do what we have done for thousands of years will require a giant leap, but it must be made to ensure that the world remains the village it has now become.
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