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THE WRONG ASSUMPTIONS MADE BY AI

By Carlos de Paula   Trusting AI blindly is a very dangerous thing. For starters, AI often makes wrong assumptions about our wishes, aims, behavior and targets, leading us through treacherous paths and sometimes, eventual disaster.   Let me give you an example, no harm was done by this one. I started a group on Facebook about Formula 1 racing. The name of the group is written in English, the description is in English, my posts as admin are in English, and I was trying to promote my books on motor racing, which are, you guessed it, written in English. Mr. Algorithm, however, thinks I want primarily Brazilians in my group, because I was born in Brazil, so it offers my group as desirable to join in Brazilian feeds. As a result, the group serves very little purpose: the posts are mostly in English, I failed to sell my books, and many users have a poor experience, for they speak no English. A lose-lose situation. Is there anyone to talk to at FB about this? Not at all. ...
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ARE TRANSLATORS DOOMED TO BE EDITORS?

By Carlos de Paula   In the early part of my career as a translator I did quite a bit of proofreading. Most of the time I was told to stick to spelling, but I faced, not seldom, poorly written sentences, grammatical mistakes, and often ended up editing the text, after getting clearance from the client which were usually translation agencies. A few were so terrible they became rewrites.   Now the practice of submitting translations to a proofreader or editor mostly disappeared from the industry, even though agency clients are often told text is edited. Translations truly edited by a competent human editor were costly, so “edit” normally consisted of the document being looked over by a project manager that did not speak the language. This meant quality declined, even though word processing software spellcheckers improved (they still have flaws, including changing what should not be changed), as prices dropped. That explains the ambiguous, horrible, dry and downright incorr...
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