C1 · متن · فناوری
روی هر واژهای که نمیدانید بزنید.
Machine translation has improved to the point where its failures are no longer funny. A decade ago the output was visibly wrong; now it is fluent, plausible and occasionally about something else entirely, which is a far harder thing to catch. The errors that survive are rarely errors of vocabulary. They are errors of register and of implication — a formal request rendered as a casual one, a hedge dropped, a politeness marker translated into a word that means what it says. The sentence arrives grammatical and slightly rude. Persian makes this plain. تعارف has no English equivalent, and a system that translates it word by word produces an offer that an English reader will accept, which was never the intention. Nothing in the sentence indicates that it was a gesture. None of this is an argument against the tools, which are extraordinarily useful and have made a great deal of the world readable. It is an argument about what the output is: a draft that reads as a finished text, and is therefore trusted more than it has earned. The practical conclusion is narrow. Use it to understand; think twice before using it to be understood. The first costs you a misreading you will probably notice. The second costs you a relationship you will not.
Machine translation has improved to the point where its failures are no longer funny. A decade ago the output was visibly wrong; now it is fluent, plausible and occasionally about something else entirely, which is a far harder thing to catch.
The errors that survive are rarely errors of vocabulary. They are errors of register and of implication — a formal request rendered as a casual one, a hedge dropped, a politeness marker translated into a word that means what it says. The sentence arrives grammatical and slightly rude.
Persian makes this plain. تعارف has no English equivalent, and a system that translates it word by word produces an offer that an English reader will accept, which was never the intention. Nothing in the sentence indicates that it was a gesture.
None of this is an argument against the tools, which are extraordinarily useful and have made a great deal of the world readable. It is an argument about what the output is: a draft that reads as a finished text, and is therefore trusted more than it has earned.
The practical conclusion is narrow. Use it to understand; think twice before using it to be understood. The first costs you a misreading you will probably notice. The second costs you a relationship you will not.