Honte Majeure

In a recent LinkedIn post, Miryam Seers, a lawyer-linguist and Chair of the ICC Canada Arbitration Committee, highlighted a rather egregious instance of mistranslation caused by the use of unrevised automatic translation by the French Ministry of Justice.

A brief history of speech transcription technologies

Transcription – the rendering of speech into writing – might seem fairly straightforward. We can all conjure the image of a stenographer, diligently taking dictation at a meeting. These days, AI-powered transcription tools are the latest milestone on the long road toward greater efficiency.

The Problems of Transcription

The purpose of legal transcription is to endow instances of speech –ranging from court proceedings, through corporate meetings, to private conversations monitored by law enforcement– with the stringency of the written record.

NYT: The Art of Translation

Sophie Hughes is a literary translator who works chiefly from Spanish into English…

Non-consensual Translation

Non-consensual Translation A French client recently got in touch with us with some concern. They reported having taken a look at the French version of the Boethius website, and being struck by the abundance of mistakes therein. This is bad enough for a corporate website, but worse coming from a language services provider like Boethius.  Also, there is no French version of our website. What was going on? The answer soon became clear. Our client had been looking at a French translation of our website that had been automatically generated by Google. Why hadn’t they realized? Because they hadn’t asked for this automatic translation: it had just appeared on their screen when navigating to our website. Our client uses Google Chrome, and, as we found out with some effort, Chrome will automatically translate foreign websites into the language set as default in the user’s browser settings. No notification is given about this, which led our client to believe the automatically-translated French version of our website was our own.  And no wonder our client was alarmed. Here are just some of the issues we found when comparing our website to Google’s version. The “Our People” section (in which we talk about our staff) is translated as Notre peuple. Peuple in French doesn’t mean “human beings in general” (that would be gens), but rather “the citizens of a country, the populace” or “a particular nation, community or ethnic group”. Peuple is what Moses would have said in French when he told the Pharaoh to let his people go.   It translated our description of translation as a “medieval trade” as commerce médiéval. Commerce in French means trade as commerce, as the sale and purchase process. The English meaning here, however, is that of trade as a job, as a profession.  It translated “review by separate parties” as révision par partis distincts. Now the French word partis means parties in the sense of a group of people who share an opinion or interest, or in the sense of political parties. In this context, we are talking about parties in the abstract sense, as a person or group that constitutes a participant in a process, which is partie. It translated “a complex dispute” as un conflit complexe. “Dispute” here means litigation, a lawsuit. Whereas in French conflit is “conflict”, as used to describe a serious disagreement or argument, or else warfare. In legal terms, conflit is the very specific situation whereby two types of jurisdiction or two courts at the same level seek, or refuse, to deal with the same case.  Thus, the situation in Ukraine is un conflit; a lawsuit is not. It translated “Chinese output” (referring to text in Chinese generated as the result of a process) as une sortie en chinois. “Output” can be translated as sortie when it modifies another term: for example, “an output device” is translated as un périphérique de sortie. However, when output is considered as an entity in itself, as in this case, the correct translation would be production: la production en chinois. Une sortie en chinois means something like “an exit in Chinese”, or “a Chinese outing”.  We have a post on our website dealing with the intricacies of translating the Portuguese legal term Visto. The point of our post is precisely that it is often best to leave the term untranslated, as there is no single English term that covers its multiple meanings. Google nonetheless took it upon itself to translate Visto as Visite, a visit, in the very title of our post.  Our client had never been notified that websites would be automatically translated on their browser, nor were we warned about this fact – which could be quite a problem for a translation agency. We have jokingly referred to this default translation setting as “non-consensual translation”, but it seems to us that there is a serious issue at stake. If the Google-translated text is presented as a non-disclosed givens, then the reality of automatic translation is obscured – and any flaws in it (and the mistakes above are potentially very serious) are likely to be attributed to the wrong party.  On a brighter note, we have managed to find a solution to Chrome’s insidious translation feature which our readers may find useful. Our website is run on the CMS WordPress platform. We added this piece of code between the <head> and </head> labels: <meta name=”google” content=”notranslate” />  Even though the website can still be automatically translated, it prevents Chrome from doing so by default. And no doubt other technical options exist.  By translating websites in this manner, Google is essentially doing two things:  It intervenes on content it does not own. It withholds this intervention from users (both website owners and readers), by making it particularly hard to detect and change.  What is elsewhere being touted as cost-free convenience is implemented on the premise  of concealing its presence, which effectively deprives users of the option to refuse – not to mention the many pitfalls discussed above.  The implications seem to be rather profound. Whether it is deliberate or not, Google’s actions amount not just to fostering their translation product, but to naturalizing it. In so doing, we believe they reflect and advance a particular understanding of language – of what language is and what it does – by which translation is ultimately regarded as an equation expressing a biunivocal function that can be solved by an algorithm. Indeed, both machine learning and the artificial neural networks on which large language models are based are statistical and, as such, rely on probabilistic functions. One ramification of this understanding is that any imperfections in automatic translation would be attributable to the fact that language models are still limited – but, given indefinitely large sets of data and an indefinitely increasing amount of computational power, perfect translation (and, some argue, superhuman intelligence) would be achieved. (We are exploring this point further in our AI series).  Whatever the intellectual merits of such understanding, it does seem

The Psychology of Reply-All

The Psychology of Reply-All Reply-All is an email feature that often provokes strong emotions. On the one hand, it lends itself to overuse, as we shall see below. On the other hand, in some contexts, like group projects, Reply-All is a necessity, and often – infuriatingly – people just won’t use it. Let us take a closer look at how to navigate the treacherous waters of Reply-All.  Reply-All disasters In February 2023, the Modeling & Simulation Office at the US Army Fort Belvoir sent a message to its entire distribution list. This list was supposed to consist of interested, eligible officers potentially interested in entering the field. However, the message was sent to over 13,000 soldiers, most of whom never intended to have anything to do with modelling or simulation. Mayhem ensued when recipients of the message started asking to be removed from the distribution list, by clicking on the dread Reply-All button.  The situation gave rise to many creative and amusing responses, like the officer who begged in rhyme to be taken off the list:  I’ve tried to unsubscribe, I’ve hit the button with might, But still the emails keep coming, day and night, It’s like a never-ending stream, with no escape in sight, I just want to be free from this digital plight.  There was also an abundance of memes: R.I.P. to everyone who got to work with 100s of emails in their inbox. The situation at Fort Belvoir is far from unique. Anyone who has to deal with colleagues in a corporate or academic setting via email will have experienced the Reply-All inbox avalanche. Sometimes an unintended Reply-All email can embarrassingly reveal the sender’s private thoughts or situation as in the company where an email went around saying expenses would no longer be reimbursed when processed but only on the 15th and last day of the month. One high-earning senior executive inadvertently revealed her financial troubles when she replied to all 14,000 employees saying this was unacceptable and how she only had less than 5 dollars left in her account to buy food until the end of the month and was relying on expenses to eat. When you need to Reply-All There is also a virtuous – and very much necessary – use of Reply-All. , which involves replying to all participants in the email chain in order to keep them in the loop. This is particularly important in group projects, where coordination and being on the same page are necessary to avoid misunderstandings and delays. However, because of the risk of mass email fiascos, many people will shy away from clicking the Reply-All button as intended – much to the frustration of project managers everywhere.  In an experiment on replying behavior in group email communications, researchers found that most people will err towards Reply even when asked to Reply-All because they are worried about starting a collective email chain reaction. When they do misuse Reply-All, it is usually because of a “lack of universally agreed upon criteria for appropriate Reply/Reply-All choice.”  The study bears closer examination. The authors found that “erroneous use of Reply features is prevalent among email users,” mainly because of the message directive (or lack thereof) and the email addresses displayed. People were less likely to Reply-All, even if directed to do so, when an email list was displayed, and took longer to respond to emails displaying multiple addresses. Participants said they were more likely to Reply-All if the email was not addressed to a large group, and if the sender originally included a set of addressees of colleagues for whom the email was clearly relevant.  However, the results also show that, in the case of emails addressed to more than two people, some participants believed all recipients should be included, whereas others focused on how relevant their response was to others. In the latter case, differing perceptions of “relevance” – judging that their response would not be important for everyone – led participants to avoid pressing the Reply-All button despite being expected to do so. When a Reply-All response is required,it must be made clear to recipients that their response is relevant to everyone! How to do so, while avoiding the pitfalls of the Unwanted Reply-All? The  study’s authors suggest improving email design features to help people make more accurate response choices. The other potential solution is establishing a “culture of explicit norms and expectations within a community or users in general.” Of course, both things are easier said than done.  What to do then?  One way to reduce recipients’ fear might be, as shown by the study, to avoid email lists in favor of explicitly displaying all the individual email addresses involved – in a project setting, people will be able to more clearly recognize their fellow team members. Another way could be including “PLEASE REPLY TO ALL” at the start of the message, e.g.  Hello, this is Jack from Accounts. Please hit Reply All when answering this email, as it’s super important that we are all kept in the loop.  The reminder can even be included in the subject line: Subject: PROJECT AURORA DEADLINES  – PLS REPLY ALL WHEN ANSWERING Unfortunately, no measure is perfect, and most likely, there will always be someone who misses the memo. In which case, project managers, the only option is the good old passive-aggressive, fake-cheery, many-exclamations-marks-added-to-conceal-irritation reminder: Thank you for these 48 databases, Linda. As we discussed, please share them with the entire team, so we are all on the same page? Thanks!!!! Go back