Translation by artificial intelligence is Portuguese in the body but English in the soul – 02/14/2024 – Sérgio Rodrigues

The translation – or something similar – of The New York Times’ report on an error by the American police was published on the New York Times website. Sheet on Tuesday (13) morning, under the title “Man declared dead reappears after family receives ashes in the USA”.

In the text you could read, among other startling things, the expression “male downtown resident” and the following sentence: “Eventually, he was released to a temporary housing facility in Portland, Oregon, on the condition that he complete a addiction recovery.”

Here I could ask, repeating the title of the book I published in 2005: “What language is this?”. English, obviously, just with the exchange of words from the original language with similar ones – or falsely similar ones – from the Portuguese language.

Is it accurate to say that “eventually” means “eventually” in the original, while its false cognate “eventually” indicates that which occurs occasionally? I should point out that “temporary housing facility” and “addiction recovery program” don’t make much sense in our language – perhaps just a little more than “male resident”?

The result is a linguistic composite, a kind of Portinglish that doesn’t even need words from George Orwell’s language to stand out: the original language is there entirely, the syntactic soul is his. Although the body is Portuguese-speaking, the software is alien.

The text in question was translated by artificial intelligence, of course. The practice has become widespread in the press because it is almost free, as well as being incomparably faster. Let human translators fight – but it is possible that in labor terms this war has already been lost.

In any case, it is recommended – even if only in the name of the old medals of honor that fill the drawers of journalism – that some human being reviews that section before publishing.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a male, female or non-binary human being, as the robot would say. The important thing is that he has blood in his veins and is a more or less proficient speaker of the language – natural, that is the crux of the matter – into which he is translating.

It is recognized that this step was taken by the newspaper, albeit late. Published at 9:07 am, the report received a version five hours later that had been purged of the most blatant translation errors. The text remained arthritic, somewhat poorly translated, but the nonsense that provoked laughter or gnashing of teeth was cleaned up.

This is not, although it may seem like it, another column about AI, what it already knows how to do and what it still needs to learn. Or rather, it is, but with another problem in mind – perhaps more serious.

What if soon the ridiculous Portinglish of robotic translations like that one becomes exemplary of the way we speak Portuguese in Brazil? Come to think of it, how many readers no longer find the English-speaking “eventually” strange and think “addiction recovery program” is a normal expression?

Linguistic xenophobia is the end of the sting, we should not forget. The import of foreign words has always enriched languages, never threatened them. Something quite different is letting a country’s education deteriorate to such a point that the soul of its language is sold cheaply and even in literature you can find constructions that seem to have come from sleazy TV dubbings.

Will we eventually all realize that language is about communicating and relaxing?

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