Document Type
Article
Abstract
I am working on a large translation project this year. I have been surprised to find several conversation partners voicing the assumption that I am getting AI to do the translating for me. I’ve been wondering how to respond.
A short, but in the end inadequate answer is that, impressive as the current variations on machine translation are, they still get things wrong. Neural machine translation services such as Google Translate and DeepL still produce oddities fairly regularly. I have been working lately with seventeenth-century Czech texts, an area in which I would expect machine translation to struggle a little more than usual. One mention of “God’s law and authority” came back as “God’s law and haircuts.” An allegation that the nobles who were meant to nourish the church were instead bleeding it dry came out as “You were supposed to be the foster parents of the church, but you were the vacuum cleaners of the church.” An odd obsession with livestock became mingled with the hope “that ye may be the dry bones of Ezekiel, whom the Lord hath covered with flesh, and hath put sinews upon them, and hath covered them with goats.” Results like these are good for a chuckle. A little more alarming are translations that voice the opposite of what the passage means, as when the statement that Job feared to look upon the nakedness of the poor, oppress the fatherless, and cause the eyes of widows to fail (an allusion to Job 31:16-23) came back as “Job would have fun if he saw the poor naked, he would mock the orphan and grieve the eyes of widows…”
Publication Date
6-3-2026
Recommended Citation
Smith, David I., "AI, Translation, and Telling the Truth" (2026). University Faculty Publications and Creative Works. 1076.
https://digitalcommons.calvin.edu/calvin_facultypubs/1076