According to officials, AI translators can be much faster than humans, but their translating capacity, in terms of accuracy, stands at about 70 to 80 percent of their human counterparts. (image: KobizMedia/ Korea Bizwire)
SEOUL, Feb. 17 (Korea Bizwire) – A man versus AI match in language translation will take place in Seoul on February 21, hosted by the International Interpretation & Translation Association, Sejong University, and Sejong Cyber University.
The contest will run for 50 minutes, and its participants include a professional human translator, Systran translator, Google translator, and Naver’s Papago translator – competing for both speed and accuracy in translating literary and non-literary sentences.
According to officials, AI translators can be much faster than humans, but their translating capacity, in terms of accuracy, stands at about 70 to 80 percent of their human counterparts.
Although many machine translators are now equipped with neural machine translation technology, which allows them to identify entire sentences to understand the complete context, the general consensus is that humans still triumph by a decisive margin when it comes to language translation.
The reason behind holding such an event, despite the likely loss for the AI platforms, is the publicity that businesses can generate through the contest – similar to Google’s motivations for its DeepMind AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol last year – and it will be an important opportunity for the three companies to show off their machines to the best of their ability.
“For now, a human translator will triumph. But given the fast pace at which translation technologies are evolving, it’s only a matter of time until AI defeats us,” said an official.
By Kevin Lee (kevinlee@koreabizwire.com)
