Text written in Basque and translated automatically by Elia without any subsequent editing. SEE ORIGINAL

“Manufacturing fit faber”, but in Basque

Does the Basque language help us to say what we want to say? To get angry, to cheat, to seduce? Or do we also need the help of Spanish, so that the sick Basque doesn’t get tired too much? It seems that we are concerned about the lies of the Basque language. But if we were to be correct, we would not have to attribute to language the nudity of our tongues. The Basque language knows how to be rigorous and playful, as long as the speakers know how to use it. Expressiveness is, in short, to say what is meant with form and grace, to provoke in the listener the desired emotion and reaction, and for this it requires the possibilities and the habit of using the language.

The difficulty of expressing oneself in the speakers worries us, so suddenly we have the AI assistants or chatbots ready to act on our behalf. The large linguistic models on which they are based use enormous amounts of text to learn: they assimilate the links between words and create the text by calculating, according to the previous ones, which can be the next ones. However, not all languages have the same weight in this learning. The Basque language has less material at its disposal, and the quality and quality of this material also have to do with the result. Learning from other languages can help, but there is also a risk that their forms will be transferred to the Basque language. The fact that the language model is large does not mean that it has the capacity to express itself in Basque.

And yet, there is grace in the machines. At least sometimes. In a session held at the HiTZ Center for this year’s Jakin, four AI assistants and a professional translator translated 80 phrases with expressive challenges, from Basque to Spanish and vice versa. Twelve evaluators compared the translations and often preferred those of the machines, believing that they received better the strength and grace of the original. Machines can produce expressive texts. (If the expressiveness is that of the machine itself, in the same sense that we have said that it is that of the speaker, we will leave it for another column)

As for us, there is something to think about. If the use of the bellows to expressiveness is active and varied, what will happen if we leave the work of saying in the hands of machines? Does it increase our power of speech? It will not necessarily be so. We are also concerned, and rightly so, that the tools produce only the Basque language. But having sharp instruments doesn’t really sharpen our tongue. When measuring the progress of AI in Basque, in addition to the texts it generates, we should take into account what it brings to speakers. It’s a great achievement to reinforce the machine, but in return we can’t be more blunt.