Translation tools from Alphabet Inc’s Google and other companies could be contributing to significant misunderstanding of legal terms with conflicting meanings such as “enjoin,” according to research due to be presented at an academic workshop on Monday.
Google’s translation software turns an English sentence about a court enjoining violence or banning it, into one in the Indian language of Kannada that implies the court ordered violence, according to the new study
“Enjoin” can refer to either promoting or restraining an action. Mistranslations also arise with other contronyms, or words with contradictory meanings depending on the context, including “all over,” “eventual,” and “garnish,” the paper said.
Google said machine translation is “is still just a complement to specialized professional translation” and that it is “continually researching improvements, from better handling ambiguous language, to mitigating bias, to making large-quality gains for under-resourced languages.”
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The study’s findings add to the scrutiny of automated translations generated by artificial intelligence software. Researchers previously have found programs that learn translations by studying non-diverse text perpetuate historical gender biases, such as associating “doctor” with “he.”
The new paper raises concerns about a popular method that companies use to broaden the vocabulary of their translation software. They translate foreign text into English and then back into the foreign language, aiming to teach the software to associate similar ways of saying the same phrase.
