Against Machine Translation

2026.06.14

When a person speaks or writes, they use their language and convey personality through word choice, intonation, pauses, etc. Through that, there are connections. There are times when using a translator is useful -- if time is limited and information is necessary to convey, for example. Despite advanced technology that can convert spoken words into text and then can translate that text, the military still spends millions to train people to speak a foreign language. Their explanation is that when pure information is necessary, and details matter less, then machine translation is an option. However, in many cases, such as interrogation or communicating with inside sources, when a human connection is important, they prefer to use humans instead since humans can convey human traits and can develop a genuine connection to someone.

Another reason is the element of passion. There's generally a clear difference between a passion project (such as an amateur film) vs a content-focused project (such as, in this analogy, a studio spending millions to create a film with well known celebrities). While in some aspects the high-budget film may be better in X aspect (SFX, lighting, acting), there are still many reasons to prefer an amateur version. Often times, the high-budget version, here representative of complex translation technology, is soulless. There's something which we cannot describe but we can feel. I was reading a translation of a piece of media earlier, translated from Japanese. It was translated by a human and one tell is the use of the word TV game instead of videogame. [1] A machine would use the word videogame since it's more modern. 

It's like AI and generative images and videos. There's no human element in machines. The result is a product either with errors or lacking human creativity. The only reason a machine translation should be used is to learn from -- sometimes. It is more convenient than a paper dictionary but I would still recommend using a website like Wiktionary to look up translations and finding more detailed information about words, such as their declination, etymology or pronunciation. I was curious and asked ChatGPT a question about a word in Russian тетрадь and it told me the form тетраду is common. AI is prone to make up words and grammar and if I didn't know this, I could believe this false information. AI is better at English since its training data is mostly from English. I suspect it knew that slavic languages often have a vocative form and that Russian is a slavic language. Therefore, Russian must have a vocative. But this isn't true, it only has a vocative in set expressions like боже or мам.

[1] テレビゲーム a term used for games when home consoles were new. Later, Japanese adapted the English word and started to use ビデオゲーム.

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