In a recently published whitepaper by Deloitte, machine translation has been cited as holding great potential in helping government agencies bring down costs, improve efficiencies and better services.
The whitepaper, ‘AI-augmented government: Using cognitive technologies to redesign public sector work’, is essentially focused on how computers and specifically Artificial Intelligence or AI can be used withing government agencies to essentially reduce the reliance on a human workforce.
Covering areas such as rules-based systems, computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and natural language processing, the whitepaper sees machine translation as a key part of the potential offered by AI.
“Machine translation has obvious implications for international relations, defense, and intelligence as well as, in our multilingual society, numerous domestic applications.”
Deloitte offer a framework in terms of approaches to automation and how its use within government agencies could impact the current state of affairs in terms of translations.
They look at four options, namely…
1. to relieve
2. to split up
3. to replace
4. to augment
…and then apply this to translation to illustrate how they see machines helping or potentially taking over from people.
For example, a relieve approach, where you essentially aim to ease burdens within public service, would involve automating the translation of easy, low-value, unimportant work that is not critical while professional translators concentrate on the important stuff.
To split up the translation workflow would mean something like using machine translation to do all the initial grunt work with a team of editors or proofreaders who mop up the translation quality afterwards.
With replace, the translator is gone and all translation work is carried out by machines.
With the augment approach, translators could use automated translation tools and the like to help them get the job done quicker, easier and more accurately.
Of course, these sorts of changes are not only happening within government bodies and state agencies; as translation becomes more and more integral to operating in our globalised world the role of machine translations is also impacting the translation industry itself and the traditional role of translators within the industry.
Companies, businesses and other organisations should be attuned to the benefits, and of course the limitations, of using machine translations.
Without doubt it is fascinating to now see Deloitte identifying machine translation as playing such a key role in the possible future strategies of government agencies.
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