The growth of AI in translation, with Mike Freiling and Daniel Morales 

Date: Saturday, September 27

This is the first of a series of planned talks about the impact of artificial intelligence on translation and related issues.

We begin an examination of the development of AI in translation. Our speaker, Mike Freiling, former Luce Scholar at Kyoto University, helped us look at how assisted translation has changed from the machine-translation past to the large-language-model present.

Freiling earned his PhD from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1977. It was one of the earliest degrees granted in the field of Artificial Intelligence. His early work in AI included investigating the analytical properties of the Perceptron (an early neural network model) and computational models of real world causality. He later helped develop rule-based AI systems, payment fraud detection models and deep learning models to identify stock market misbehavior. He was named a Luce Scholar in 1977 with an appointment to Kyoto University where he worked with Prof. Makoto Nagao, a pioneer in the area of machine translation. He recently completed One Hundred Poems from Old Japan, a translation of the Hyakunin isshu, published by Tuttle this year, and he and his wife Satsuki Takikawa also co-translated They Never Asked (OSU Press), an anthology of senryū poems written by Japanese-Americans incarcerated in Portland, Oregon, during World War II.

Our moderator, Daniel Morales, is a writer and translator based in Osaka. He has written the website HowtoJapanese.com since 2008 and was a frequent contributor to the Japan Times Bilingual page. Find his monthly newsletter at
newsletter.howtojapanese.com.