How AI can help protect minority languages
A piece I wrote in July discussing the impact of generative algorithms on translation, “Has AI Finally Toppled the Tower of Babel?”, caught the attention of my friends at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). After extensive editing and adding some context about Spain’s recent request for Catalan, Basque and Galician to become official languages in the European Union, it was published on CEPA’s website with the title “Will AI topple the European Tower of Babel” (pdf).
Now, Marcos Sierra, from Spanish online newspaper VozPópuli, has used it in an article in Spanish (pdf) in which he proposes that Spain’s Congress use automated algorithmic translations instead of human interpreters to enable the use of these three languages in its sessions.
Until now, automated translations, despite having improved significantly over the last few years, provided results that, at best, simply gave an idea of the content, without much nuance, and sometimes choosing words that made no sense . This was because these programs initially worked through a text word by word, then learned to do so sentence by sentence and then paragraph by paragraph, while the more sophisticated ones were eventually able to apply some generic context.
With the advent of generative algorithms and massive computing power applied to their training…
