Know your Language Service Provider (LSP). Before signing on with them, ask questions and do a little research on their website to ascertain how and whether they use machine translation (MT) and/or AI.

This is essential if the material you are having translated, edited, or proofread contains your personal data or that of your customer(s). If it doesn’t, it’s still a good idea to find out what the LSP’s policy is in using MT/AI within the company’s systems.

Many LSPs nowadays are relying heavily on MT/AI in their online systems because it means more profit for the company = less human involvement, less expenditure and hassle. But isn’t this at the expense of the customer who may, unknowingly, submit private data that is fed into the LSP system and “stored” there forever, to be used as translation memory (TM). TM’s are stored and used for future translations. The key word here is “stored.”

I worry about this a lot, as we get further and further into the use of AI in all fields. This article is over a year old, but still relevant today, maybe more so. Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (Stanford HAI), and Caroline Meinhardt, Stanford HAI’s policy research manager, published a white paper titled “Rethinking Privacy in the AI Era: Policy Provocations for a Data-Centric World.” Just one of their points is that generative AI tools trained with data scraped from the internet may memorize personal information about people, as well as relational data about their family and friends. This data helps enable spear-phishing—the deliberate targeting of people for purposes of identity theft or fraud. Already, bad actors are using AI voice cloning to impersonate people and then extort them over good old-fashioned phones.

So, please be careful. Make sure you are opting-in for MT/AI. If you don’t know, you may be paying the regular price for a human translation that costs the LSP next to nothing to produce. This is a double profit and highly unethical on their part.

Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns. I DO NOT use MT/AI indiscrimately, only on certain material and sparingly for grammar and spellchecking tasks. It IS better at seeing some thing than the human eye…especially mine. 🙂