Popular generative AI models like ChatGPT and Copilot are easy to use and so they give the impression that everything you can use them for is a piece of cake. You ask the chatbot to translate your text, copy and paste it into the bot and there you go – you’ve got a translation! But translating with AI is a lot trickier than it seems. A translation agency can help you adopt a responsible approach.
First of all, it’s important to be aware that generative AI models (AI chatbots) weren’t designed for translation. They’re intended to generate content. That’s all. While chatting to your new AI friend, you’ve probably noticed that he doesn’t always get it right when you ask him to do something. He might generate an image of someone with six fingers, for instance, or schedule people for cleaning duty on their days off, even though you told him not to. Something similar can happen when you ask an AI model to translate a text, but it’s rather tricky to check when you don’t speak one of the languages.
What’s more, a translation agency doesn’t ask any old chatbot to translate a text. A professional agency uses specialist tools and models that were developed specifically for translations. The ‘raw output’ that we use for AI translations is already of a higher quality than that produced by chatbots like ChatGPT. The required financial investment and expertise are feasible for a translation agency, but not for all companies or private individuals. It’s similar to hiring a contractor to do some work on your home. You might be a dab hand at DIY yourself, but the professional contractor has the best tools and the right expertise and skills.
On top of all this, we humans are always ultimately responsible for the content we generate and distribute with this sort of AI model. So a human always needs to thoroughly check an AI translation, taking into account the required style and forms of address, the target audience, the purpose of the text, and so on. A linguist is trained to do this and is, importantly, a native speaker of the language the text has been translated into.
Last but not least, a linguist is familiar with the numerous other pitfalls of AI translations and knows how to fix them properly. One frequent problem is that technical terms aren’t used consistently in an AI translation. Or that you ask the model to translate a term a certain way and the model does this 100% of the time without considering nuances. Linguists spot such issues right away and then go on to fix them.
In a nutshell, if you don’t want your translation to look like a dodgy DIY project, leave it to a trusted translation agency.
