Machine translation and Orwell

For many translators, machine translation is a combination of nuclear war and global warming. There is a sense that it will wipe them out from the map but they hope that it won’t happen in this generation. This week, I skimmed through two articles discussing MT. My thoughts were led not the future of the profession but to the future of English.

The first article, written by Florian Faes and cited by Slator in its weekly newsletter, discusses the linguistic differences between texts translated by MT as compared to human translation after editing. Among the writer’s conclusions, albeit on a limited literary sample, was MT texts tend to have a higher resemblance to their originals in terms of structure even when this structure differs in the target language as well be “simpler and more normalized”.

In another article, also cited by Slator, Jochen Hummel, the creator of the Trados computer assisted translation (CAT) tool, declared that his tool would no longer be used in the future but instead all human translation would be based on MT. In other words, the opus of previously written text will standardize our language. As I see it, what was will be in a much stronger form than today and subject to manipulation by corporate and governmental organization.

These two observations led me to recall Orwell’s 1984. For those who have forgotten or simply never read the book, he described a world where the government controlled everybody (Big Brother). Interestingly, one of its main tools was its control of language. English vocabulary had been reduced to the bare minimum. For example, a negative was expressed by adding “un” to the positive, e.g., unhungry. All texts were online (yes, this book was written 1949) and amended as political winds changed so that the public never had any proof of any change in policy or thinking. Looking at North Korea in 2019, Orwell would be appalled but not shocked.

Given that English is the dominant language of communication worldwide for the foreseeable future and assuming that machine language, however “artificial” it sounds initially, becomes the statistical and controlling norm, it is not hard to imagine a world in which people’s thoughts are expressed in intentionally simplified language and form. It would be undoing Dickens and Shakespeare, to name a few.

It is clear that MT has its place and will not disappear. It also clear that MT will have a huge influence on translation project management. Looking at the development of chat language, which is also simplified in many ways, it can be argued that this language is no less rich and individual. However, I still fear the gradual “poorification” of English not as a result of government action but instead due to industrial pressures.  I hope Orwell was wrong in this prediction and that 1984 will never come.