The Société française des traducteurs (SFT), a French union for professional translators and interpreters, has released a statement on the use of AI translation and GenAI.

The SFT published the statement in mid-June 2024, following a survey of members between November-December 2023, and now encourages all professionals — members and the unaffiliated alike — to share the statement. (The SFT reported 1,648 members as of June 2020.)

The statement acknowledges that the translation industry has already been impacted by major technological upheavals; namely, the introduction of neural machine translation (MT) in 2016. Since then, clients and language service providers (LSPs) alike have largely adopted this technology.

Still, the statement posits, that the output [of machine translation] remains unreadable in its raw state, and requires humans to correct it via post-editing: “But 70% of our member translators who responded to our survey considered PE (and by extension AI) a threat to their profession.”

More specifically, the SFT calls for the respect of human expertise and strongly recommends against replacing human language experts with AI tools, particularly in high-stakes scenarios. 

Source:https://slator.com/

Full article:https://slator.com/french-translators-society-takes-tough-stance-on-ai-translation-genai/