And the winner is: A translation battle

Previously we brought you a story that should put to bed (for the time being at least) who is more superior when it comes to translation services, man or machine? The showdown that was organised by the International Interpretation Translation Association in conjunction with Sejong Cyber University in order to get a real feel of how machine translations are when compared to traditional human translators. With all the advancements in translation technology of the past year alone such as the neural machine translation or NMT which self learns from over a million examples of over 100 languages and allows for a more holistic translation of sentences rather than word by word so would be perfect for those seeking say Portuguese translation services for non-professional reasons.

Just a reminder the human translators were represented by four professional translators who were pitted against three artificial intelligent (AI) machine translators which consisted of the western world behemoth Google translate from Google Inc. based in the USA, the self-learning hybrid translation software Systran machine translator from Systran International and Naver’s Papago from Naver Inc. which is Korea’s leading internet provider. All seven competitors were given 50 minutes to translate two random English articles into Korean and then two Korean articles to translate into English.

So standing in the red corner, they have been walking this Earth for roughly 200,000 years, they have risen to the top of the food chain, countless languages spoken and an unknown amount created; we have the Human “Homo sapiens” Translators! (CHEERS) And in the blue corner we have the younger, faster, and created by humans but maybe better than humans; Machine “Robot” Translators! (Boo’s obviously.) LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLEEEE!!!! Of course that’s not really how it happened but that’s how we like to think it might have happened.

It was tense, it was difficult, it was one hell of a battle, after all the pride of all translators and professional translation agencies and humans everywhere was on the line. But just as the bookies predicted the fan favourites, and still the champions of the translation world, the Humans did in fact come out on top. With the professional translators delivering the knockout blows by scoring an average out of 30, a massive 25 on the scorecard whilst the AI/machine translators scoring only between 10 and 15 for Korean translation services.

But man’s triumph over machine may not last so long, with more advancement the gap will surely be closing, with the NMT progressing and learning more it is only a matter of time before the machines take over hopefully not any time soon.