What’s trending in the investment circle now? No need to ask, it’s definitely the sharing economy and artificial intelligence. Speaking of artificial intelligence, I’ve been hearing people talk recently: “AI translation will replace simultaneous interpretation” and “people in the translation profession are not far from being laid off”; on one side, a company showcases AI simultaneous interpretation at a conference, while another company releases a new hardware product that can achieve real-time voice translation in 80 languages… This scares us into quickly pulling out the translation device we used as kids, but I heard that it’s now also called a translation machine.
How far has AI translation really developed? At the most basic level, can it help us communicate without barriers when traveling to countries with different languages? Yesterday, a Silicon Valley newsletter selected several representative translation products that claim to replace human translators, using Chinese-English translation as an example, and set up several common scenarios that ordinary people are likely to encounter to see how effective they really are.
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Test Subjects
Eight products, five of which are free apps, and three are expensive hardware.
It’s understandable that Huawei phones come with AI translation, but what’s the purpose of products like NetEase’s Translation Egg and iFLYTEK’s Xiaoyi? Why are tech giants still producing them when there are mobile apps available?
After carefully reviewing customer comments on these two hardware products on e-commerce platforms, it seems there are two main groups of buyers: one group is elderly people who are confused by smartphones, and the other is parents buying them for their children to learn foreign languages.
The Xiaoyi, priced at nearly 3000 yuan, also has a group of tech enthusiasts who are looking forward to the launch of a reserved function key for “human translation”.
We evaluated their functionalities in two categories: photo/video translation and voice translation. Both the Translation Egg with a screen and the Xiaoyi without a screen do not possess photo/video translation capabilities. Therefore, they were placed in the second round of voice translation competition.
Translation Apps
1. Tencent Translation (Free): Produced by Tencent, supports four languages: Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean.
2. Youdao Translator (Free): Produced by NetEase Youdao, supports seven languages: Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Russian, and Spanish, with offline translation.
3. Google Translate (Free): Produced by Google, can provide instant translation between 80 languages.
4. Baidu Translate (Free): Produced by Baidu, supports translation between 28 popular languages including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Thai, French, Spanish, and German.
5. Sogou Translate (Free): Produced by Sogou, supports translation among over 50 languages including Chinese, English, French, and Japanese.
Translation Hardware
1. Translation Egg (Price: 688 yuan): Produced by NetEase Youdao, supports translation in seven languages: Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Russian, and Spanish.
2. Xiaoyi (Price: 2799 yuan): Produced by iFLYTEK, supports five languages: Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, French, and Spanish. A new feature for offline translation was launched in September this year (the testing process was conducted offline).
3. Mate 10 (Price: 3899-4499 yuan): Produced by Huawei, comes with built-in AI translation capabilities, supporting translation in over 50 languages.
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Photo/Video Translation Function Evaluation
When traveling abroad, we need to look at menus when dining, check signs for directions, and read instructions when buying things. But what if we encounter unfamiliar characters?
Most translation apps have photo translation functions; by clicking to take a photo, the system will automatically translate it. We challenged five apps and the Huawei Mate 10’s photo translation function with the Starbucks name “Starbucks Coffee”, an English menu, an English book, and an English sign.
Tencent Translation:The translated Chinese overlays the original label, creating a sense of incongruity. The accuracy is average; it gets confused with handwritten fonts and artistic fonts, which is a common issue among several products.
Sogou Translate:It smudged the English on the image directly into Chinese, giving a photoshopped feel, and the translation is relatively accurate.
Youdao Translator:It requires a high shooting angle, parallel to the reference line; after several attempts, the success rate is low, and the translation accuracy is also not high.
Baidu Translate:Unlike other apps that can automatically translate after taking a photo, this one requires smudging and generates a dialogue box that completely covers the original image, resulting in a poor user experience. It might be due to low recognition rates; some menus and English signs were only half translated, and some very simple words were not translated at all.
Google Translate:It has a built-in instant camera translation mode; when you point the camera at something written in another language, it will translate it in real-time to the language you are using, which is very cool! However, in practice, Chinese to English translations often have minor issues, and sometimes the pages appear garbled.
Huawei Mate 10:Pointing the phone’s camera at the sentence to be translated does not work. It can only translate word by word, functioning like a translation device that doesn’t require manual input.
Now let’s look at a few photos of the menu translations.
Youdao
Tencent Translation
Sogou
Baidu
Sogou translates Starbucks
Youdao translates Starbucks
Tencent translates Starbucks
Baidu translates Starbucks
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3
Voice Translation Evaluation
In this round of voice translation evaluation, we first designed scenarios for asking for directions, shopping, and dining. The “AI translators” performed effortlessly, so there’s no need to elaborate here. We also designed eight categories of voice scenarios, some serious discussions and some playful attempts to break them, but their performance exceeded our expectations!
In summary: Based on this evaluation, several translation software handle daily phrases with ease, but they often encounter problems with obscure vocabulary and sentences.
– Spoken Language –
Couple’s Lung Slices
NetEase Translation Egg: sliced beef and ox tongue in chili sauce
Sogou: pork lungs in chili sauce
Google: couples lung piece
Baidu: Pork Lungs in Chili Sauce
Youdao Translator: Husband and wife lung slice
Tencent Translation: Pork Lungs in Chili Sauce
Huawei Mate 10: pork lungs in chili sauce
iFLYTEK Xiaoyi: a pair of couple’s lungs
Crossing the Bridge Rice Noodles
NetEase Translation Egg: bridge the rice line
Sogou: Guoqiao rice noodle/Guo qiao rice mee
Google: Yunnan bridge noodles
Baidu: Cross the bridge noodle
Youdao Translator: Bridge the rice line
Tencent Translation: Cross the bridge noodle
Huawei Mate 10: Cross the bridge rice noodles
iFLYTEK Xiaoyi: Cross the bridge rice noodles
– Internet Slang –
That’s Heartbreaking, Old Iron
NetEase Translation Egg: The old iron is pierced.
Sogou Translation: Take heart, old iron.
Tencent Translation: My heart’s broken, old fellow.
Baidu Translation: Take the heart of the old iron.
Google Translation: Tie old iron.
Youdao Translator: Tie the old iron.
Huawei Mate 10: Have heart lao tie.
iFLYTEK Xiaoyi: Have a heart lao tie.
– Conclusion –
Aside from short spoken phrases, to test the limits of these “translators”, we also tried to get them to translate names of Chinese dishes, trendy internet slang, etc.
The accuracy of several translation devices is quite similar. The most amusing was iFLYTEK Xiaoyi, which, when faced with “Couple’s Lung Slices”, broke down and told me in Chinese that it’s “a pair of couple’s lungs”. From the translation results of the internet slang “That’s Heartbreaking, Old Iron”, only Tencent Translation understood me. The biggest issue with Google Translate is its voice recognition; “Excuse me” was recognized as “Old home let someone”, which made us doubt our Mandarin skills.
Moreover, translation apps often resort to word-for-word translation when faced with obscure phrases. For example, Youdao Translator translated “Couple’s Lung Slices” as “Husband and wife lung slice”; similarly, Tencent Translation rendered “You can you up” for “You can do it”. We couldn’t help but recall Lei Jun’s saying, “Are you OK?”.
It’s worth mentioning that both Huawei Mate 10 and Xiaoyi translated “Excuse me” as “Excuse me, please”, which is indeed polite.
Evaluation
Testing
Continues
– Long Sentence Translation –
Study hard and make progress every day.
This slogan, which has been distorted into Chinglish, is not a problem for the genius AI translators. Although the translations vary among the different tools, they are generally accurate.
For voice translation between Chinese and English, the AI translators all performed excellently. We also tried to get them to translate English movies and songs, using “Loving Vincent” and a song by Beyoncé called “Perfect” for testing.
Perhaps due to the interference of the musical environment with language, all the devices failed. It seems that our wish to watch a foreign film without subtitles using a translator is currently unachievable.
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Conclusion
Will we be able to watch American dramas without subtitles in a year?
With AI translation, do we still need to learn English?
Voice-interactive translation using voice recognition technology should be the most commonly used in daily life. After testing, we found that the AI translators have no problem recognizing Mandarin, unless your accent is too heavy; iFLYTEK Xiaoyi even supports Cantonese and Sichuan dialect.
The translation after voice recognition is the real test for them. Based on this evaluation, we believe that the highest accuracy is with iFLYTEK Xiaoyi and Huawei Mate 10; the ones that best understand Chinese (spoken language, internet slang) are Youdao Translator, Translation Egg (which incorporates Youdao’s neural network translation), and Sogou Translate. Xiaoyi is said to be even more powerful in business meeting translations; while Google Translate, which made a high-profile return to the Chinese market this year, still struggles to understand the nuances of Chinese. Baidu Translate and Tencent Translation performed adequately overall, without any stunning interpretations or major errors.
Image recognition technology for photo and video real-time translation is truly cutting-edge, with Sogou demonstrating absolute superiority in terms of both presentation and accuracy.
The development of “AI translation” in China has reached a stage of explosion. We used simple and straightforward topics to evaluate the translation levels of these five apps and three translation devices, and everyone now has a rough understanding of what “AI translation” is like in daily life. Basically, as long as you have internet access and a translation device, asking for directions, shopping, and dining while traveling are not issues.
At this year’s Internet Conference, Sohu CEO Zhang Chaoyang revealed that Sogou is developing its own translation machine. He stated that it will not only achieve real-time translation of conversations but will also capture the speaker’s voice characteristics and translate the speaker’s accent and tone, allowing us to watch American dramas without subtitles in a year!
Recently, NetEase has once again taken the lead. They have launched an AI software called “NetEase Jianwai” which is remarkable for its ability to translate real-time video into subtitles.
So, with AI translation, do we still need to learn English? The speed of AI translation development exceeds our imagination, but to say that it can replace human simultaneous interpretation at conferences is still a long way off. Professor Zhou Haizhong, a mathematician and linguist, pointed out in his paper “Fifty Years of Machine Translation” that it is impossible for machine translation to reach the level of “faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance” until we understand how the human brain performs fuzzy recognition and logical judgment in language. This is a significant bottleneck restricting the quality improvement of machine translation.
Translation is the art of communication, not just a conversion from one language to another, but also a crossing of cultures.
Content source: Hangzhou Silicon Valley Newsletter/Translation Craftsman
Transferred from: Han Yu Tang
