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Auto-Translation Programs to Face off Against Human

Two auto-translation programs are to face off against a professional human interpreter here later this month in a bid to gauge progress toward artificial intelligence.

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Sejong Cyber University and the International Interpretation and Translation Association of Korea said Monday that the contest will be held on Feb. 21 between a human interpreter, Google Translate and Naver's papago translation app.

The competition will be broadcast live on Sejong Cyber University's website.

They will translate two articles chosen at random from an English-language daily into Korean and two Korean ones into English, being given half an hour for each.

The judges will be Korean professors and professional interpreters including Kwak Eun-joo from Sejong University.

The organizers said computer-assisted translation technology is developing rapidly, raising concerns that human translators and interpreters could soon become obsolete. They added that the aim is to gauge the current level of technology and assess the strengths and weaknesses of humans in that field.

Computer translation has improved since Neural Machine Translation technology was developed. Naver and Google introduced NMT-based translation programs in October and November of last year, and though the results have been lackluster so far, the programs are capable of learning.

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