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Japanese is the only language I speak. I can read English, but it takes a long time and it wears me out. We are publishing in English anyway.
Japanese is the only language I speak. I can read English, but it takes me a long time and, honestly, it wears me out. I often wish I had taken language study seriously as a student. Technical material is faster and more accurate in English, so I cannot avoid it — but one paper takes me several times longer than it would in Japanese.
When I was young I thought: languages are a chore, and memorising vocabulary is miserable. That bill has arrived rather late. Taking a language far enough to use it in real business, while also running a business, is an enormous investment of time — and these days, if I have that time to spend, it goes instead toward putting a better product into the world.
When machine translation became usable, I thought the barrier was gone. For reading, it was enough. But when it came to translating my own writing and sending it out, a different worry took its place.
I had no way of checking whether the nuance had survived.
That is less a problem of accuracy than a problem of verification. Does the translation read naturally? Is it accidentally rude? Is it more absolute than I meant to be? You cannot inspect your own sentences in a language you cannot read. So you do not send them. The entrance had gotten lower, and I was still stuck at the exit.
Now I can ask why a particular phrasing was chosen. I can ask for a rewrite aimed at what the reader already knows, rather than a literal translation. And the quality itself is not comparable to what it was.
The worry has not disappeared. But “this might not come across” and “I cannot read or write this at all” are completely different situations. The first one you can work on. The second one has no road forward at all. What AI did for me was turn the second into the first.
Our corporate site is already in Japanese and English. This blog will be published in both as well. Today is day one.
As for the product, customers have told us that it ought to be usable in English. It is a business platform where an AI does the work, so the reasoning — that it should run in the language of the person using it — is sound. I am considering it. I am not in a position to promise a date, but I will say that it is on my mind.
People reach for that phrase when they talk about AI, and I used to find it a little grand. Speaking only for myself, it turned out not to be a metaphor. I read more, and I can address more people than before. That is all it amounts to — and that is plenty.
For a small company, I think this is a considerable change. Our reach grows without our headcount growing.
If the English on this blog or on our website looks odd to you, please tell us through the contact page. A note like that is valuable to us — it can go into improving the product, and into my own English.