Does the advance of technology dull our human skills?
I’ve been keeping notebooks—these are mostly work-related journals—for almost a half century. For most of that time I printed my entries, but about a year ago, for no particular reason, I reverted to cursive writing.
After doing that, and having heard that they’ve stopped teaching cursive writing in some schools, I started wondering how many young people can read cursive.
Some studies show that as many as 60 to 70% of children and young adults—I’m not sure of the age group definitions—cannot read cursive writing.
If they’re no longer teaching cursive, that number will probably go up, and the ability of AI to decipher cursive writing is going to move the needle further in that direction.
Should this be something to be concerned about? Perhaps not, but the concern might be more warranted with regard to AI translation in terms of loss of human ability to translate without technology.
There is much talk these days about AI usage reducing our ability to do things we formerly could do without using such technology. Most of the discussions seem to focus on things like loss of reasoning ability and critical thinking, not specific skills such as translation.
That said, I am reminded of a translator on a long-defunct mailing list I was on years ago, way before the AI transformation, who defended his use of CAT tools because he “couldn’t be bothered to look up lots of kanji.”
He honestly said this on a mailing list populated by Japanese-to-English translators, for whom being able to read Japanese is (or at least still was at the time) part of the job.
Much more recently, I have encountered translators who say that using CAT tools is a given, and that they can’t imagine translating without them. That attitude is probably influenced by the knowledge that many freelancers need to agree to use CAT tools even to receive work, let alone do it, but it speaks also to the issue of human skills.
What would they do, I wonder, if they were sat down somewhere and told to translate without CAT?
Enter AI translation, and some translators who might be using AI to translate—I think it actually might be more than just a few—might someday (perhaps that someday was last month) find it difficult to translate without having AI to use.
Having never been forced to use and having never used CAT tools and not being a user of AI for translation—I use AI sometimes for other things—my take on this situation might be somewhat different from that of translators who have gone with the flow of technology in its various evolutionary stages, as it moved the translation workflow from one in which a translator looks at a Japanese source text and keyboards an English translation to one in which there is extensive and sometimes opaque involvement of technology in the translation process.
Could it be that the ability of “stand-alone” humans to translate is fading away? Does it matter?
My guess is that it doesn’t much matter to, and is welcomed by, translation resellers on tier one of the two-tier translation purchasing/reselling business that control the flow of the overwhelming portion of translation work.
But the obviating of human skills in the formerly most valuable (and most highly compensated) translation process step is not and should not be welcomed by translators, at least the ones who are able to resist the repackaging of AI repair work as a “high-value” task that will provide them a survival path.
Post-editing might arguably be a high-value task—it certainly is, because it enables the agency MTPE business model—but it is and will continue to be a low-paid task. That situation is assured by a continuing ample supply of former translators to do post-editing. It’s a nasty situation, and solutions are rare.
If you ask AI about this (I have), you will, not surprisingly, be told that translators need to switch to more high-value work. Don’t bother asking the AI what that might be that involves translation, because it knows what side of its algorithm is buttered with the hopes of the wonderful world of an AI-mediated life that awaits us.