78シンポジウム
Translation: Final Frontier for Artificial Intelligence?
Mark Jewel(Waseda University)

This symposium was inspired by the impression that recent advances in artificial
intelligence made it an appropriate time to revisit the topic of machine translation, first
discussed at a JASEC forum at Waseda University about a decade ago. After all, if acomputer program can be devised that can defeat even a high-ranking professional Go player(something that was expected to take at least another 10 years but became a reality in Marchof this year), there is reason to think that the even more formidable challenge of fluent
computer translation from one language to another might soon be overcome. Certainly Google
Translate and other online services appear to have set their sights on achieving such a goal,
even if technical experts in the field of machine translation modestly demur when asked point
blank about the likelihood of that happening. Just how far has machine translation come?
What advantages are retained by human translators? What conditions must be satisfied inorder to judge machine translation a success?
By way of approaching these questions in a spirit of friendly competition, twopanelists—one a technical researcher in the field of machine translation and the other ajournalist for an English-language online newspaper published in Japan—were invited toprovide English translations for a set of Japanese examples and comment on the results,
which were provided to the audience in the form of a handout. The examples were selected by
the moderator based on extensive use in a university class on Japanese-English translation,
and were classified into six categories: signs and simple instructions; longer instructions andadvice; short biographical and geographical passages; descriptive passages from travel guides;
expository passages from elementary-school textbooks; and newspaper opinion columns.
The translation itself was performed by Google Translate (treated as the AI
representative) and native-English-speaking staff writers for the English Mainichi website(with which the second panelist is affiliated). In addition to discussing the examples, thepanelists were encouraged to expand on the topic in any fashion they saw fit, with results as
described in the summaries below. From the moderator’s point of view, it must be said that
the Google Translate versions, although often capable and occasionally quite impressive, didhave trouble managing idiomatic usage, especially in longer, more expository passages. Thisoutcome was perhaps only to be expected given the conditions imposed and (as the technicalresearcher quite justifiably noted) the rather small and arbitrary nature of the corpus. Itshould also be recognized that machine translation is in fact being used effectively in real-lifesituations, not only in the fields of business and IT but also by the public at large.

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In any case, audience participation in the subsequent Q&A session demonstrated ahigh level of interest in the topic, and on the basis of the presentations and the remarks of thepanelists during the Q&A, it seems safe to conclude that collaboration rather than competition
between computers and humans will remain the most productive form of commercial andtechnical translation, at least for the immediate future. At the same time, mention was madeof a new approach that is currently under development and promises to greatly enhance thequality of machine translation, so perhaps human translators would do well not to become toocomplacent.