AI Is Terrible at Translating: Why Christians Should Care, Best TV Shows to Binge Watch

When someone sees my last name for the first time, they tend to pause. They’ll furrow their brow, purse their lips, mouth the word out—testing how it feels before uttering it out loud.

“It’s pronounced ‘chow,’ like ‘puppy chow,’” I say.

There’s a sign of relief. They tell me they weren’t sure and didn’t want to butcher it.

“It’s OK,” I reassure them. “Nobody knows how to say it.”

My last name, Tsiao, is Chinese. It’s my husband’s surname, which I took when I married him a few years ago. And when I say that nobody knows how to say it, I’m not kidding. Siri repeatedly pronounces it “teh-sigh-oh.” My own family still hesitates on the spelling—their brains really want to alphabetize the vowels. And technically, “chow” is the Americanized pronunciation of the name. So although I can come really close to saying it with the correct Chinese tones, my hubby and in-laws like to tease me when I try, since it’s still slightly incorrect.

“It’s OK,” my husband reassures me. “Nobody expects you to say it correctly.”

Perhaps that’s because he and his siblings—all born and raised in the United States—were never expected to learn Mandarin Chinese, their dad’s first language. They all grew up speaking English. And my father-in-law, though still able to communicate with his mother in Mandarin, admits that even he’s lost a bit of the language due to cultural assimilation.

In 1992, American linguist Michael Krauss published The World’s Languages in Crisis, in which he predicted that up to 90% of the world’s languages could eventually disappear.

Now, while that probably won’t apply to Mandarin (with roughly 900 million native speakers, it’s one of the most spoken languages in the world), it speaks to a bigger problem about our ability to communicate—and one that Christians in particular should be concerned about.

AI and Foreign Languages

For years now, tech developers have been attempting to perfect language translation apps and software. The results have been … mixed.

Can these tools help you get around a foreign country when your family is on vacation? Sure. Simply ask your question in your home language and they’ll pop out a reasonably reliable translation in the language you choose.

Are these tools sufficient for deep conversations about faith and theology? Well, it depends on the language.

For high-resource languages (meaning that the language has substantial linguistic resources and support, both oral and written)—such as English, Spanish, Japanese and more—language translators aren’t too bad. Do they always get it flawless? No. But they do help break down the language barrier enough that, with patience, you could have a conversation with someone about God in their native tongue without actually speaking that language yourself.

And now tech developers want to bridge that gap even further through the use of artificial intelligence. Translation apps can be stilted and formal. So, many AI models have been trained on foreign languages so that when you plug in text (or even speak it out loud), it intuitively translates your thoughts into conversational tones.

Again, that works great for high-resource languages. And according to Matteo Wong with The Atlantic, there’s even some promising developments for low-resource languages, too. But consider this: Most AI models learn through resources found across the web. And nearly 90% of all websites are written in just 10 languages. So, the languages that make up the other 10% of websites (or perhaps don’t have a web presence at all) won’t be able to be translated by AI—or at least not nearly as well.

Wong went on to say that because many of the internet’s existing sites for low-resource languages are already poorly translated, the AI models that are trained on them will likely produce equally flawed (if not worse) results. It’s “akin to asking someone to prepare a fresh salad with nothing more than a pound of ground beef,” he said.

But it goes further than that.

In another article for The Atlantic, Louise Matsakis wrote: “Learning a different way to speak, read and write helps people discover new ways to see the world—experts I spoke with likened it to discovering a new way to think. No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience.”

Now, you may be thinking that this is fine. If you or your child want to learn a foreign language, then you can enroll in a foreign language class and learn from a real, live person. Or perhaps you’ll simply download a language-learning app, such as Duolingo, Rosetta Stone or Babbel—each of which developed their programs with the help of native speakers.

But once again, we return to the low-resource problem.

Those apps I mentioned? They cover fewer than 50 languages of the nearly 7,000 worldwide. And it’s not enough that a lesser-known language is similar to a more widely-used one either.

When I was in high school, my dad and younger sister went on a mission trip with our church to a remote mountain village in Costa Rica. Before the trip, they’d been advised to learn some Spanish since that was the primary language of the region. But once they arrived at the village (only accessible via hiking or helicopter), they realized that the few lessons they’d had in Spanish weren’t sufficient for even basic communication.

Although the indigenous language was, in fact, similar to Spanish, it was different enough that even fluent speakers of Spanish were unable to communicate freely with the tribe. Now, the missionaries stationed there permanently had spent years immersing themselves in that culture. So they had a firm enough grasp on the language to conduct more than just basic communication (and a few of the locals knew enough Spanish to help bridge the gap, too). But no AI translator or language-learning app was going to fix their problem and suddenly make translating God’s Word a seamless process.

AI and the Great Commission

So where does this land us as Christians? Why does all or any of this matter?

Well, because we’ve been given the Great Commission.

According to UNESCO, there are at least 6,700 different languages spoken worldwide (other sources say there are even more). Only 1,726 of those languages have access to a translation of the New Testament, says Wycliffe Global Alliance. And just 756 have a full Bible translation.

But UNESCO also estimates that 40% of the world’s population cannot access education (of any sort, let alone biblical) in a language they speak or understand. So while these statistics are wonderful news about the Good News, we as Christians still have our work cut out for us.

AI can be a helpful resource. Earlier this year, the Gospel Coalition outlined precisely how organizations are using AI to speed up the Bible translation process:

“We’re not talking about dropping the Greek New Testament text into a tool like ChatGPT or Google Translate,” Don Barger writes. “This isn’t possible even for resource-rich languages like English, much less for small and low-resource languages.” Rather, translators are of the same mind as Matsakis: “No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience.”

So instead of just copying and pasting the Bible into an AI translator, they’re training their AI models on existing human-translated verses. Then, they allow AI to create a first draft, which is then used as a resource as human translators work toward the final translation.

Surprisingly, social media can also be a helpful tool. In an article for The Walrus (a Canadian magazine), Michelle Cyca outlined how many speakers of indigenous languages are creating communities on social media to teach and share their less common languages with others. It allows native speakers who moved away to connect with people who use the language daily. And it also provides an opportunity for the children and grandchildren of native speakers to engage more deeply with their heritage since they may not have learned that language growing up.

So, can AI help us reach more people in their “heart language,” as Barger put it, than ever before? Sure seems like it. But should we still exercise caution and discernment? Also yes. After all, God called people to share His message, not a bunch of machines.