News that Dutch publishing house Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK) has confirmed plans to experiment using AI to translate fiction has stirred up a thought-provoking debate. Some believe it marks the beginning of the end for human translators, while others see this as the opening up of a new world of possibilities to bring more literature to even more people. These arguments are becoming increasingly vocal as the advance of AI accelerates at an ever-increasing rate. This debate interests me as my work examines the intersections of art, ethics, technology and culture, and I have published research in areas of emerging technologies, particularly in relation to human enhancement. Across every new technology, debate centres on what we stand to lose by embracing change and, with AI, this echoes the developments in the recent history of genetic science.

As anyone who has tried pointing their phone's camera at a menu in a foreign country lately will know, machine translation has improved rapidly since the first days of Google Translate. The utility of AI-powered translation in situations like this is unquestionable – but the proposed use of AI in literary translation has been significantly more controversial. Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning's announcement that it would use AI translation for commercial fiction has outraged both authors and translators – despite attempts to reassure them with promises that no books will be translated in this way without careful checking and that authors will have to give consent. "A translator translates more than just words, we build bridges between cultures, taking into account the target readership every step of the way," says Michele Hutchison, winner of 2020's International Booker prize for her translation of Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening. "We smuggle in subtle clues to help the reader understand particular cultural elements or traditions. We convey rhythm, poetry, wordplay, metaphor. We research the precise terminology for say agricultural machinery, even in a novel."

Microsoft today announced an update to its translation services that, thanks to new machine learning techniques, promises significantly improved …

Microsoft today announced an update to its translation services that, thanks to new machine learning techniques, promises significantly improved translations between a large number of language pairs. Based on its Project Z-Code, which uses a "spare Mixture of Experts" approach, these new models now often score between 3% and 15% better than the company's previous models during blind evaluations. Z-Code is part of Microsoft's wider XYZ-Code initiative that looks at combining models for text, vision and audio across multiple languages to create more powerful and helpful AI systems. At its core, the system basically breaks down tasks into multiple subtasks and then delegates them to smaller, more specialized models called "experts." The model then decides which task to delegate to which expert, based on its own predictions.

Or in developed nations that are less wealthy than their closest neighbors, like my native Portugal. Because of the country's modest economic size, compared to most of Western Europe, many online companies have limited (or no) presence in Portuguese. British Airways, for instance, only offers customer service in Portuguese on weekdays during business hours--and they're a global airline with enormous operations in Europe. What's more, there are almost 230 million native speakers of Portuguese worldwide, the vast majority of them in Brazil (where, yes, British Airways also offers flights). It's the sixth most spoken language in the world.

As part of January's The Future of Translation series, we delved into our predictions on what was next for the Language Services Industry in 2020 and beyond. One of the most exciting developments that we mentioned in our series was the evolution of Artificial Intelligence Translation. But the question remains: Why should you care? What exactly does the evolution, and adoption, of AI-powered translation mean for your business? So, without further ado… Let's get into it!

Artificial intelligence (AI) has infiltrated numerous aspects of our lives in recent years, thanks to improvements in the field of machine learning, where computers ostensibly program themselves. This drive towards digital self-learning has led to major breakthroughs in our day-to-day interactions with machines, most notably the rise of digital home assistants such as Amazon Echo, and the recently launched Google Lens, which identifies objects based on visual cues from your phone's camera. One of the most widely-discussed advances has been the use of AI in translation. Not unlike the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with AI translation, "you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language." The technology works by recognizing words individually and then, as MIT Technology Review puts it, "takes advantage of the fact that relationships between certain words…are similar across languages" to create its translations. It has already found its way into a number of our most commonly used websites and platforms, with even grander plans in the pipeline – but just how reliable is the technology?

In recent years, machine translation has improved immensely thanks to advances in deep learning and neural networks. However, the advantages of neural networks come at the cost of not knowing for sure what goes on inside them, which means it's hard to troubleshoot their mistakes, such as when they translate "good morning" in Arabic to "attack them" in Hebrew. Researchers at IBM and Harvard University have developed a new debugging tool to address this issue. Presented at the IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology in Berlin last week, the tool lets creators of deep learning applications visualize the decision-making an AI makes when translating a sequence of words from one language to another. Called Seq2Seq-Vis, the tool is one of the several efforts that aim to interpret decisions made by deep neural networks.

It is not out of reason to boldly say that translation is of great importance to man. The diversity of languages and cultures in the world makes translation essential to humanity. The benefits of translation to humankind spread across businesses, politics, international relations, tourism, and education. Any company can go global. Moreover, the secret of a successful international business lies in quality translation services.

'"There is certainly the incentive for other social media platforms to develop their own AI translation functions too. Google is also moving forward on AI translation. Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and others will have to get on board as well, if they want to remain competitive and continue to capture a large share of the reading and viewing market.Marketers will gravitate toward those channels that offer accurate AI translations, as they strive to reach global markets. The savings in time and money are just too attractive. And the opportunities to connect with a global audience for marketing purposes is just too critical.