Don’t let a robot murder your sense

Original Tweet © Jeune Afrique

TWO YEARS ago the Freelance asked: Is ‘artificial intelligence’ always wrong? We suggested: "consider the AI we already use - machine translation. It does the typing for us en Français, par example. But then we must assume that it is wrong." Now a machine translation system has come up with possibly the perfect example of why you must do this.

The magazine Jeune Afrique ran and Tweeted a most wonderfully poetic standfirst. Feeling lazy, we hit "translate" and got:

Between weariness and bitterness, the former Gabonese president received Jeune Afrique at his residence in La Sablière. His calls for the release of his wife and son are like cries in the wilderness, and his killer, Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, refuses to see him.

You can see that there is a problem here. Former president Ali Bongo was presumably alive when they interviewed him.

The English phrase we're looking for is "the man who brought him down" - not "his killer".

The moral of the story: rough-draft translation is one of the better applications of machine learning to text. But never, ever publish its output before you have checked with a human who understands the original language.

© Mike Holderness