When AI erects the Tower of Babel

A comparative reading between the original “The Great Gatsby” in English and the Korean version translated by novelist Kim Young-ha was recently made. Kim translated in his own words when he found out that the existing translation failed to convey the vivid expressions in the original copy. Indeed, Kim has succeeded in grasping Fitzgerald’s descriptions with his professional imaginations. Still, his version also contains several mistranslations due to lack of comprehensive skills. Though Kim’s name was not explicitly mentioned, Emeritus Professor Kim Wook-dong of Sogang University criticized his translations and published his own translation.

A translation dual between human translators and Artificial Intelligence (AI) translating programs took place at Sejong University, held by the International Interpretation and Translation Association (IITA) on Tuesday. Out of a total 60 points (30 for literature, 30 for non-literature), human outperformed AI by scoring a total average of 49 versus 19.9. In particular, 90 percent of the sentences that AI translated in the literature test were not grammatically correct and did not end as full sentences. When ranked according to brands, Google Translate came in first at 28, Naver's Papago second at 17, and Systran third at 15.

The match consisted of Korean to English translations and vice versa. However, experts commented that AI would have scored much higher if the event was held within the same alphabet language group such as English-Spanish. The same applies when translating between other groups such as English-Japanese, which the AI already accumulated mass data, and Japanese-Korean, which shows high linguistic similarities. Results may have turned out different when English source texts were first translated into Japanese and then translated again into Korean, or vice versa.

The sentence “time flies like an arrow” can be mistranslated into Korean as “the time fly likes arrows.” To get the translation right, AI needs to gather more examples and learn as patterns. In the meantime, AI will dominate everyday language, which can be easily learned in patterns. In the Bible, God knocked down the Tower of Babel and blocked communication by splitting into different languages. The day will come when AI succeeds its final goal of translating even literature to perfection, and humans will resurrect their forbidden Tower of Babel once again. Still, it seems AI has a long way to go before humans can read an AI-translated version of “The Great Gatsby.”