Three months after The Guardian published an op-ed entirely written by AI, Yandex announces the “first-ever book translated by AI from English into Russian in less than a minute and published for a mainstream audience.”
The book is that of Daniel Susskind, a famous English economist, on the coming era of artificial intelligence: A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond.
It took Yandex.Translate just 40 seconds to translate the entire 352-page book from English to Russian. “A human translator was not needed, just an editor was enough, though usually these people work in pairs,” said the company.
The algorithm used for this translation is typically used for large texts, for example for non-Russian Wikipedia articles in Yandex Search. “The Yandex service has long been using a neural network based on the advanced Transformer architecture, which helps achieve high translation quality. The architecture has in many ways served as the basis for YATI, a new Yandex technology that was announced at YaC 2020,” explains Yandex — which is how the 352-page book was translated so fast.
Felix Sandalov, Editor-in-Chief at Individuum Publishers, said its company had been looking at machine translators for a long time, “as the quality of their work is growing at a dizzying speed.”
“The automation of such a complex and knowledge-intensive activity may worry us, but we also feel optimistic about it. We believe that the algorithm is not the enemy of the human translator, but an assistant. After all, this translation still needed editing.”
The algorithm “coped really well with the original text’s syntax, made virtually no mistakes in its vocabulary choices.” Such a job would have taken a human months, according to Sandalov.
Not only was the book translated using algorithms: the image on the cover was drawn by Yandex’s neural network.
The book will be published in print in December. Its electronic version is already available to Bookmate subscribers.
Susskind is an economist at Oxford University and a former advisor to the British government. In the book, he reflects on the future of work in connection with progress in artificial intelligence and the increasing automation of work once performed by humans. At the same time, Susskind notes that humanity has tired of fearing competition from machines and he dispels misconceptions about robots replacing humans.
