Okay, the title of this blog post is a bit misleading. Yes, Google Translate is AI, but it’s not sentient (yet?). Instead, the thinker here is the team behind the very popular translation tool.
In a recent BBC News article, author Jessica Brown makes some very good points about why Google Translate and other AI can’t replace human translators. If you’re familiar with the debate, they probably won’t surprise you …except one.
Brown mentions that the minds behind Google Translate never claimed that it was meant to take over for humans.
That’s right - as this article points out, the platform’s official guidelines explicitly state that it’s not intended to replace humans. Google Translate isn’t Jarvis from “The Avengers” – it’s just a tool; it’s up to humans to provide the fact-checking and intuition.
Read on to learn more about why we can’t rely only on machine translation – and why some Google Translation fails may actually come down to us expecting the tool to do more than it’s intended to.
Contact Our Writer – Alysa Salzberg