Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

CAN WE HUMANIZE TRANSLATING MACHINES?

 1- Machines, including translating machines, are never doing things the way human beings do. Machines imitate human beings by moving from a starting point to an endpoint, but the routes followed from one to the other are not at all the same, just bringing in the same ending.

2- Still and for some more unspecifiable time, machines are not able to extend, as Marshall McLuhan would say, the full human mind, human spirituality, human existential experience, and human rebellious creativity.

3- There cannot be any global come-together of humanity if everyone cannot access all that everyone else is doing.

4- We must understand the libraries of still today will disappear and be replaced by servers that will contain all the “knowledge” and “arts” and “science” and “technology” of the human species from all ages, ancient, middle, and modern, and open onto all future ages.

5- No matter how, but this enormous Virtual-Real Library will have to be open access, which does not mean free, at no charge, in a way or another, because intellectual property has to be developed and the people who create or invent this intellectual property have to be able to live from it.

6- Will the future world choose to enslave all intellectual property creators and hence owners to some guaranteed state income with no link with any market, or will humanity choose to enable these creators and owners to draw, from their intellectual property, an income that will be proportional to the use, usefulness and circulation of their intellectual property?

7- If we keep that concept of intellectual property it is quite clear a machine does not own anything and a machine is not a copyright holder + moral rights on top. Hence who is accountable if something goes wrong? The designer of the machine, the worker using it, the company owning it, the translator of the badly translated User’s Guide?

8- No matter how good the machine can be, it is always the owner of the machine, not to mention the worker on the machine, that owns the goods produced by the machine and the human work that goes along with it.

9- Apart from the problem of accountability, to finish with a touch of humorous provocation I would say translating machines cannot understand, exploit, not to mention translate all the backdoors invested in a text by the author, due to his mood, his wit, his own experience. Such innuendo evades a translating machine, just as much as this machine cannot have any hormones, except those invested into the machine by the programmer.

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:07 AM