This article, combined with the one we read last week, was very interesting to think about the future of automated translations, especially for more routine translations. Though I hadn't been conscious of the day on which it occurred, I did definitely notice an upgrade in Google Translate's abilities to translate more extensive phrases and make it sound much more natural than the more "robotic" translations of the past. I did find the article's discussion regarding what is considered AI to be interesting because though I had never really thought about it, most things that were once AI seem to be losing that title as its function is becoming more generally available to the public and routine. Another aspect of this new Google Translate is its ability to learn and this raised the question for me about Japanese translations. Because Japanese has hiragana, katakana, and kanji, it made me wonder how well Google Translate can produce the same result if the same sentence is typed with hiragana, katakana, or kanji. In the same vein, if a person makes a mistake in the kanji they select to describe something, a human translator, though they may lead to a mistranslation, can determine this mistake and determine the meaning from context, whereas it is more probable that a machine would have more trouble with this error. But on the flip side, as we discussed during the mistakes in translation homework, humans make errors too, so if these translation technologies become very advanced, they may eventually be able to proofread for human translators as a way to prevent some of these errors.
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