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Comment by qq66 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there will be much of an impact on the interpreter industry until the machine translations are significantly better than human translations.

Human translators are so expensive today that they are only used in situations where the translation has to be correct -- diplomacy, courtrooms, books, etc. Until a machine is much better than a human, these use cases won't switch to machine translation (similarly, self-driving cars won't be allowed until they are proven to be much safer than human drivers).

On the other hand, there's a large casual market for machine translations today for situations like reading foreign Web sites, chatting with people in different countries, reading Tweets in a different language, etc.

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Translators and interpreters are still used in a fairly wide range of situations. I've worked both as a document translator and as a spoken interpreter in a number of manufacturing plants.

After watching this video, I'm fairly confident that a large part of the interpreting that I did could already be handled by this technology.

Luis von Ahn, one of the creators of reCAPTCHA, has a fascinating project going:

http://duolingo.com/

The idea is to teach people language at the same time as providing a real time translation service. Apparently if you multi-plex novices (and not at a bad rate) you get expert translation at a similar accuracy. The translators benefit by learning language, and the service is self supporting by proving translation.

He did an excellent TED talk on the subject:

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_c...

Sounds like taking on interns or co-ops. Pretty nice idea.

While machine translation is not ready yet, there are some incremental innovations in the interpreter industry.

A local entrepreneur is having some success with a remote system for interpreters that tries to replace the interpreter console and related expensive interpretation equipment:

http://www.glotweb.com/

Not sure how his has handled the strict no-lag requirements though, but they were doing trial runs in Washington and San Diego.

>Human translators are so expensive today that they are only used in situations where the translation has to be correct -- diplomacy, courtrooms, books, etc.

Professional translators and trained interpreters yes.

But thousands of people work solely (or assume the role periodically) as interpreters and translators for many more situations, mainly revolving around business.

Now, signing a business deal will still involve translator and a trained lawyer, but those other everyday cases, including showing a western partner around the Chinese offices, could switch to machine translation.

Or you know...many of the middle class Chinese that work in the offices that already speak English. Honestly, when I've walked into a Chinese office I've never had the "noone speaks English" problem, while the big boss who doesn't speak English would prefer to have one of the younger guy/gals around anyways as a sign of status.

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