Here’s an imagined conversation. (Inspired by years of following sales talk about AI dubbing, and more recently, Veronica Hylak’s YouTube test of Apple AI AirPods’ live translating feature: https://youtu.be/bAYxMVC1KN4?si=YTcBrkgv3F4-G0Xs).

–       Hey, I have this amazing new technology. It’s the future of localization. It will translate and voice a movie at the touch of a button, from any language into any language! It will look and sound like the original actors are speaking the target language!

–       Can I see the movie?

–       No. But here’s a 30 second clip. And it’s not translated into another language. But see how we changed the word “fucking” to the word “frigging”? Awesome, isn’t it?

–       Uhm …

Some elevator music. Time moves on.

–       Hey, look! We’ve made progress. Here’s a movie!

–       So I can watch this now in any language?

–       No. We started with just one.

–       So this was done fully automatic?

–       No. We still need humans in the loop to edit what the machine did.

–       Fine. Let me see.

The film plays.

–       But the voices sound mechanical, and they are not consistent. The main character’s name is pronounced in many different ways. There are translation mistakes. And the dialogue is not natural. Questions don’t have answers. Modifiers dangle. I could go on.

–       Early days. Don’t expect perfection.

–       How bad would it be without humans in the loop?

–       There will always be humans in the loop.

–       Phew. I guess this means I can keep my job after all. But this isn’t really a movie I’d like to watch.

–       Yeah okay. Maybe we’re not ready for movies yet. But look! Here! Automatic instant translation for your conversations! It’s just like talking, except you’re talking in a foreign language!

–       Let me try.

–       It will only work with a certain type of phone.

–       Fine.

–       You will need the newest software.

–       Okay.

–       The person you’re talking to will have to have the same.

–       Yes.

–       Your data will be fed into our cloud.

–       Give me the phone already!

Some more time elapses, but no elevator music.

–       Well?

–       Sorry but somehow the conversation didn’t really flow. There seemed to be translation mistakes and the time lag was pretty bad. And the machine didn’t understand my Mexican Spanish. I had to speak a different variant to make myself understood.

–       Okay, but was it better than nothing?

–       Yes.

The end.

It’s an imagined conversation, but it’s taking place everywhere. In the localization industry, it took only a couple of years to move the conversation from “this is the end of language borders” to “it’s better than nothing.” It can only be a matter of months until the first product is seriously marketed with the slogan “Better than nothing!” And if you think I’m joking, I’m not. Translations software is being tested by asking evaluators not to analyze whether the output is good, but whether it’s better than nothing.

Since when has “better than nothing” been something on which a product is being sold? I can make a sound. That sound is – perhaps arguably – better than no sound. But should I sell my singing? Uh … no. You don’t want that.

“Better than nothing” always already exists. In translation, it’s hands and feet, it’s pointing, it’s drawing. A translation app needs to be better than THAT. Not better than nothing.

A zero is not increasable. Multiplying a zero doesn’t get you a number. I don’t think I fully understood this until I saw Fozzie’s agent Irving Bizarre negotiate a new contract for him on The Muppet Show:

https://youtu.be/2qlrOrstEGU?si=BRksphObd-_B198E

Ten times nothing is nothing.

The phrase “better than nothing” literally doesn’t mean anything unless you only think in Zeroes and Ones. But in the real world? Nothing doesn’t exist. Everything is always something.

One cracker is better than zero crackers. Tell that to a starving person. Trying to sell something on the virtue of it being “better than nothing”? That’s only one thing: cynical.