I was recently talking to an outsider about my work as a freelance editor and translator, and AI inevitably came up. Was I worried about losing jobs because of AI? It’s a fair question, one that occasionally – and unsurprisingly – pops up in a discussion list for editors to which I subscribe. To be honest, I’m not. As Grammar Girl writes in her newsletter about AI and its impact on people like me, ‘[f]or a lot of clients, AI may not be the cheapest or most efficient way to get the writing or editing they need’. I did an editing job earlier this year that perfectly illustrates the damage AI can do, and I thought I should share it with you.
The text was a historical article about World War II, with frequent references to the anti-fascist resistance movement that fought between 1943 and 1945 to liberate Italy from Nazis and fascists alike. It was an extremely heterogeneous movement, made up of resistance fighters coming from three main groups: the Communist Party, the liberal-socialist Action Party and Christian Democracy. There were also socialist partisans and members of the moderately conservative Liberal Party. However, my author revealed the presence of an additional group that other historians must have overlooked: shareholders. Shareholders? Um, maybe just some people worried about losing their shares because of the war…?
I suspected from the start that this was an AI-generated translation from Italian, not least because the author sent me the original Italian article along with the English version (which we had not agreed). At first glance, the text looked fine and didn’t contain the usual mistakes made by native Italian speakers, but it did sound very Italian, so it was clearly a literal translation. Occasionally, punctuation was lacking and the syntax was messed up as a result. The translation was also inconsistent: for example, the name of an Italian newspaper was sometimes translated, sometimes left in Italian. It dawned on me that this could very well be a machine translation.
My suspicions were confirmed when I came across the famous ‘shareholders’, mentioned alongside some of the other groups involved in the resistance. I checked the original and there it said ‘azionisti’, members of the Partito d’Azione – the Action Party. OMG. The software translated ‘azionisti’ literally, completely ignoring the context and despite the party name being mentioned earlier in the article, but clearly AI doesn’t remember that far back. Not so intelligent after all, eh?
Now I understand why people might need to use translation software. Academic publishing can be a real money pit, so you think the software will save you money, but it won’t if the result is inconsistent at best, ridiculous at worst. Without a human editor who knows what they’re reading, someone who may even have studied Italian history, you risk embarrassing yourself in front of your colleagues.
But if you must rely on translation software, here are two tips: (1) have a human being post-edit the translation; (2) tell them that you used translation software. Copy editors always figure out the truth. ALWAYS.
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