AI Translation: good or bad?
By Carlos de Paula I have studied so-called machine translation from the very beginning, since the 90s. To tell you the truth, it was very bad back then. Thirty years down the line translation software has improved. However, most AI translations still sound like AI text, devoid of style and life, incapable of understanding figures of speech, irony, humor, nuances, and the proverbial text between the lines. I figured that sooner or later it would be widely adopted as a tool, so in the last couple of decades I continued to study several software titles in myriad languages. As it stands, AI produced translation continues to have a major problem: it reads context very poorly. This can breed trouble in several languages, for the same word can have different meanings in the same language, for instance, “recurso” has several meanings in Portuguese. This results in all types of nasty havoc, embarrassment for starters. Legal issues are more serious, for the mo...