The ATA Chronicle - July/August 2020 - 29

FEATURE

BY JAY MARCIANO

present such a radical shift in the tools available for translation
that it's not merely time for us to rethink but to reinvent our
industry and ourselves.

THE LAW OF ACCELERATING RETURNS

Future Tense: Thriving
Amid the Growing Tension
between Language
Professionals and
Intelligent Systems
With accelerating technical changes in the industry,
the best way forward is not to fear neural machine
translation and artificial intelligence but to use a
disciplined approach to reinvent yourself.

he translation and interpreting professions are thousands of
years old. Throughout the ages, every major technological
advance having to do with the rendering, storing, or
processing of language has required a rethinking of the way
language professionals conduct their work. These days, the talk
is all about neural machine translation (NMT) and artificial
intelligence (AI) and whether they pose an existential threat to
the translation profession. The changes occurring around us
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That things are changing for translators is nothing new, but
what is different is the rate of change. If it seems to you that
technological advances are coming faster than ever, then you
have a good sense of what's going on. In his 2001 paper "The
Law of Accelerating Returns," futurist Ray Kurzweil posited
that our rate of technological advance doubles every 10 years,
which can basically be explained by our ability to use the
latest technological efficiencies to speed the development of
the next wave of technology.1 Instead of arguing whether or
not this is true, I'll simply use Kurzweil's statement as a way
to explain why my head is spinning.
To make the math easy, let's start this example in 1980,
when I began my university studies. At that time, my decadelong frame of reference for the speed of technological advance
was the 1970s (which brought us pocket calculators, the
video game Pong, VCRs, the C programming language, the
Apple II, and the Sony Walkman). If we assign a value of 1 to
the rate of technical change in my reference decade and that
rate doubles every 10 years, then the rate of technical advance
in our current decade is 32 times faster than it was back then.
Let that sink in for a moment. According to Kurzweil's model,
the technical advances that we churn out in the 12 months of
2020 would have taken 32 years of effort back in 1970.
A curious thing about human beings is that we tend
to place ourselves in the middle of everything, including
exponential growth curves, which makes it challenging for
us to comprehend extreme rates of change. In Figure 1 on
page 30, which places 2020 in the middle of a timeline that
illustrates Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns from 1950
(the decade that saw the first serious work on MT) through
2100, we're still on a flat part of the curve, and the truly
dizzyingly steep part of the curve is yet to come.
But it's critical to remember that the growth is exponential
throughout the curve. In Figure 2 on page 31, we see the
identical growth curve, also beginning in 1950, but at a
scale that allows you to appreciate how much the rate of
technological advance has increased recently.
While NMT is already having a tremendous impact on the
way many professional translators work, technological advances
that bear directly on our work-including but certainly not
limited to MT-will not only continue but actually accelerate
and have profound effects throughout the industry. The day-today work of the translator of today will be hardly recognizable
to a language services professional in 2030.

WHY IS AI COMING AFTER LANGUAGE?
The intentional application of nuanced communication is one
of the main measures we use to signify intelligence in living
organisms, and we also extend that measure to manmade
objects. A robotic vacuum cleaner that bumps into walls and
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The ATA Chronicle - July/August 2020

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