It’s 2020 – VR, AR, SR, MR, CR, 5G, AI… the future is now. Can we expect human translators to be replaced with translation robots soon? Translation machines and AI-powered translation robots are speedy, cheaper and convenient. They don’t need to sleep, don’t need a salary or benefits, will never retire, and support multiple languages. An obvious choice at first glance. However, the human brain still remains the best translation solution. Human languages are full of nuances, and contain figures of speech, symbolism, idioms, cultural references, slang expressions, humour, satire, puns, sayings, chengyu and all kinds of indirect usage that robots, including AI-powered machines, cannot comprehend. It’s not likely to happen in the coming decades either. The same string of words can carry different meanings in a different context. To target a different audience, a different tone, manner and style would need to be adopted. Human translators provide a much higher accuracy than translation robots in any case. After all, translation and linguistics are not hard science – they are art.
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