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Abstract
In the fall of 2016, users of Google Translate working from French to English and English to French saw a marked improvement in the quality of the translated texts. Google Translate was beginning to develop from a purely phrase-based statistical machine translation system into a system that uses deep learning and artificial neural networks that can adapt and learn in reaction to all they encounter. The Google Translate development team has been working on expanding and strengthening the system’s capability of pragmatic analysis. This capability entails extracting useful information from a text so that its meaning can be accurately inferred in an attempt to overcome the vagueness and ambiguity inherent in language, which have remained the greatest hurdles to effective machine translation. This article explores the potential of Google Translate to provide increasingly competent translations of literary texts. Using passages from the works of Voltaire translated by Google Translate into English, this article explores both the successes and the ongoing problems faced by new generations of Google Translate, and of machine translation systems in general, as their developers seek to overcome the hurdles of identifying and rendering style, nuance, and ambiguity in language.
Notes
1 In an interview with Andrew Goldman in the New York Times (Jan. 25, 2013), Kurzweil claimed: “By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people.”
2 In November 2016, Barak Turovsky, Director of Product at Google Artificial Intelligence, announced on Google Blog: “Today we’re putting Neural Machine Translation into action with a total of eight language pairs to and from English and French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish. These represent the native languages of around one-third of the world’s population, covering more than 35% of all Google Translate queries!”
3 See Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyunghyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio, “Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate” (International Conference on Learning Representations, 2015): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.0473.pdf.
4 See Peter Norvig, “Making a Difference.” Google Research Blog, 17 Feb. 2006, https://research.googleblog.com/2006/02/. Accessed 11 Nov. 2019.
5 For an extended analysis of how the new neural networks tackle these ambiguities, see: Jakob Uszkoreit, “Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding.” Google AI Blog, 31 Aug. 2017, ai.googleblog.com/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural-network.html. Accessed 11 Nov. 2019.
7 And yet, Google Translate is not the first to translate Voltaire’s famous maxim as “If God did not exist, it would have to be invented.” Linda M. Paterson in her highly regarded monograph The World of the Troubadours (Medieval Occitan Society, C. 1100-1300), published by Cambridge UP in 1995 (the year before the founding of Google Inc.) also translated it in this way, perhaps making an ideological point.
8 Adapted from an example suggested in Denis Golovin et al., “Reasoning about Conditional Beliefs for the Winograd Schema Challenge” (COMMONSENSE, 2017): http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2052/paper10.pdf.
9 In translations from French to English, Google Translate sometimes has trouble figuring out if the masculine and feminine pronouns, “il” and “elle,” refer to objects or people.
10 Translated by Google Translate, July 20, 2019.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Peter Constantine
Peter Constantine is Professor of Translation Studies and Director of the Program in Literary Translation at the University of Connecticut. He is the publisher of World Poetry Books and the editor-in-chief of the magazine New Poetry in Translation. His recent translations include Augustine’s Confessions, The Essential Writings of Rousseau, The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, and works by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Voltaire. He co-edited A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900–2000, and the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, which W.W. Norton published in 2010. A Guggenheim Fellow, he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov.