摘 要

在大数据时代，人工智能（AI）的发展和全球化的加速，改变了广大公众对某些职业和行业的了解，并丰富了其内涵。人工智能正悄悄地改变当前的世界，包括可以远程操作的智能手机和智能家电的普及。 AI应用程序几乎无处不在。因此，运用人工智能更好地服务于人类社会是人类需要不断学习和完善的课题。目前，机器翻译和人工智能翻译在翻译方面取得的重大进展，引起了翻译专业和语言专业人才的热烈讨论甚至焦虑。本文根据中华人民共和国职业分类中对“翻译”项目的修改情况，从英语专业尤其是翻译专业的可持续发展角度出发，结合人工智能在翻译中的应用，探讨翻译行业，翻译教育和翻译专业如何应对人工智能带来的影响。本文预测，在未来的二三十年内，尽管AI在翻译中的应用将会更加广泛和稳定，但高层次翻译人员仍然会供不应求。

关键词：人工智能；翻译行业；翻译专业；教育；就业

Abstract

In the era of big data, the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and the acceleration of globalization have changed the understanding of the general public on certain occupations and industries as well as have enriched the connotation of them. AI is changing the current world quietly, including the popularity of smart phones and intelligent home appliances that can be operated remotely. AI applications are almost ubiquitous. Therefore, applying AI to better serve human society is a subject that humankind need continuously study and perfect. At present, the great progress made in machine translation and AI translation in translation has caused hot debates and even anxiety among translation professionals and language majors. This paper, based on the revision of “translation” item in the Occupational Classification of People’s Republic of China, combined with the application of AI in translation, will discuss how should translation industry, translation education and translation profession deal with the impact brought by AI from the perspective of the sustainable development of English majors, especially translation majors. In this paper, it is predicted that in the next 2 to 3 decades, although the application of AI in translation will be more extensive and stable, high-level translators will still be in short supply.

Key Words: Artificial intelligence; Translation industry; Translation major; Education; Employment

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 The Development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Translation 3

2.1 Machine Translation: the predecessor of AI Translation 3

2.2 The Booming Development of AI Translation 4

3 The Challenges of cultivation of Translation Majors 7

3.1 The Changing Translation Industry 7

3.2 The Current Situation of Translation Major 8

4 The Impact of development of AI Translation 11

4.1 The positive impact on healthy development of Translation Major 11

4.2 The Prospect of Translation Industry 12

4.3 The Concern of Development of AI Translation 13

5 Conclusions 15

References 16

Acknowledgements 18

An Analysis of the Influence of Artificial Intelligence on the Translation Industry

1 Introduction

Before discussing AI translation, its predecessor machine translation should be mentioned first. In 1946, the first modern electronic computer ENIAC in the world came into being. In the next year, American scientist, the forerunner of Information Theory Warren Weaver generated the idea of automatic translation with machine and put forward it formally in his Translation Memorandum in 1949. In 1954, the American Georgetown-IBM Laboratory successfully used the IBM 701 computer to translate 60 sentences from Russian into English，which was the starting point of machine translation practice. Although having confronted with bottleneck several times, machine translation never stopped advancing in the past 7 decades. Currently, the general public have systems such as Google Translation, Microsoft Translator and Baidu Translation on hand.

Besides practice, machine translation theoretical translation is also under way. The study of machine translation started earlier abroad. From 1954 the experiment mentioned before, machine translation has started gaining attentions from scholars. One significant representative is M.A.K.Halliday, who became interested in machine translation as early as 1950s. And in 2006, he emphasized the importance of machine translation in the inauguration ceremony of The Halliday Centre For Intelligent Applications of Language Studies in City University of HK again. In Linguistics and Machine Translation, he criticized that researchers and developers ignored the linguistic elements of machine translation, which was vital in improving the quality of machine translation (Halliday, 2007). Domestically, machine translation emerged in 1957 and gained prosperity during 1980s because the opening-up and development policy enhanced the need of translation service. Before 1988, domestic scholars focused on the translation evaluation, after the Transtar-1 coming out in 1988, studies extended to the application, evaluation, impact and prospect of machine translation.

The first work that generally recognized as AI was McCullouch and Pitts’ 1943 formal design for Turing-complete “artificial neurons” and AI was founded as an academic discipline in 1956. The development of AI is circuitous, although AI has gained many supports and investments now, in the past two decades it has also gone through “AI winter”. Currently, AI technology has already been applied in various fields, including AI driving (Autopilot of Tesla), AI game (Alpha Go) AI translation (Tencent AI simultaneous translation) and so on. AI translation is praised as the gem in the AI crown as language is one of human beings’ distinctive competence. In the last two decades, scientists are trying to apply AI to improve the quality of machine translation and had made significant progress, for example, Google Translation can translate more than 60 languages and Tencent translation is improving the AI simultaneous interpreter.

The development of AI translation has put great impact on translation industry, translation education and translation profession. Quite a few enterprises are trying to follow the trend to apply AI translation or to develop their own AI translation technologies. Many translators worry about that AI translation may snatch away their jobs in the future. While, in the development process of AI, doubt sound never disappeared. Some remains sarcastic to AI translation as they believe that even with in-depth learning ability, machine can never really understand human languages. This paper, through analyzing the development and prospect of AI translation, combined with the study of current condition of translation education, translation industry and translation majors, will study the impact of AI translation on translation industry. It is assumed that AI translation will enhance the reform of translation education and translation industry and the future trend is the cooperation between AI translation and manual translation.

2 The Development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Translation

2.1 Machine Translation: the predecessor of AI Translation

Machine translation stared in 1954 from the experiment conducted by Georgetown University and IBM. From 1950s to early 1960s, machine translation research is on the rise because the two superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union —have provided a large amount of financial support for the machine translation projects out of their military, political and economic purposes, and the European countries have also given considerable investments to machine translation because of the geopolitical and economic needs. China started studying machine translation in 1956 and in 1957, the Institute of Linguistics and Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences carried out the experiment of Russian-Chinese machine translation and translated 9 relatively complicated sentences of different types. From 1964 to 1975, because the report of ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee) was pessimistic in machine translation, the development of machine translation sank into stagnation. During 1970s, with the development of science and technology and the increasingly frequent exchanges of scientific and technological information among countries, the language barriers between countries and countries have to be broke. The traditional manual translation efficiency has been far from satisfying the needs, thus machine translation is urgently needed again. Domestically, the "784" project attached much importance to machine translation research. In 1980s, the research of machine translation in China accelerated with the increasing exchanges with outside world. Two E-C translation systems KY-1 and MT/EC863 were successfully developed. Currently, driven by market needs, the commercial machine translation has entered the practical stage and has gone to the market. With the advent and popularity of the Internet, the amount of data has increased dramatically, and statistical methods have been made full use of. Many internet corporations have set up their own machine translation research groups and developed the machine translation system based on Internet big data so that machine translation can be used by the general public conveniently. By now, many advanced machine translation apps are available to mobile phone users and a such as Google Translation, Baidu Translation and Youdao Translation.