Скачать или смотреть Can AI translate poems? What about fiction?

In this video, Chris Song shares his experiences of using AI for translating general content, poetry, and fiction. Song, an assistant professor of English and Chinese translation at the University of Toronto, is also a poet, translator, and editor. With four published collections of poetry and numerous volumes of Chinese English literary translation, he provides valuable insights into the intersection of technology and literary translation. While computer-aided tools prove useful in translating literary works, they have limitations in handling cultural nuances, colloquial expressions, and the technical intricacies found in poetry. The reliance on AI is likely to eliminate the opportunity for translators to build an intimate relationship with the text.
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[00:00:00] Chris Song: As a scholar of translation studies, I like the idea of using AI. In the area of translation studies, we often call it the Computer Aided Translation. In the past, although it's not like a translation device that's powered by open AI, like ChatGPT, a lot of the professional translation tools were already powered by AI even 10 or 15 years ago.
[00:00:28] I think in terms of general translation, it helps a lot, especially the low-cost test such as the reviews we see on the hotel booking website.
[00:00:41] I also use the ChatGPT to help with the literary translation, especially fiction. When we translate fiction, I think it also helps a lot, but we have to be very careful when we edit the translation. In translation studies, we call this activity post editing, and it means we edit the translations that the machine produced. I find the AI will miss this sentence or that. So if we use the ChatGPT to translate fiction, you have to be very careful to see what it misses, an need someone with translation experience to edit.
[00:01:22] When it comes to cultural expressions, then it will become pretty hard for the AI to understand, and also colloquial expressions. And you have to do it yourself.
[00:01:37] I think the last weakness about using ChatGPT or computer-generated translation is if you use that, you lose the opportunity to build an intimate relationship with the text, simply because you spend less time with the text.
[00:01:58] And for literary translation that involves a lot of humanistic elements, it's not good. You will understand less about the text or appreciate less about the depth of the text while you're translating.
[00:02:12] I also use the ChatGPT to try to translate or experiment on it to translate some poetry, especially modern poetry. And I found the main problem is that modern poetry has all these very strange ways of cutting the lines. And also, there is no indication of where a sentence begins and where a sentence ends in a poem. The ChatGPT will misinterpret the grammatical structure of some of the sentences if the lines are cut in the middle of the set, or even when the stanzas are separated in the middle of the sentence. It will be even harder for the ChatGPT to realize these very small technical elements in the poem.