Pictured above: Officer Crabtree, from the popular 1980’s British series ‘Allo ‘Allo, played by Arthur Bostrom.
Post updated: 6 May 2024
Recently, I conducted an experiment to see if I can attract overseas visitors to my blog. The thinking behind that was if I translate some of the posts into (for example) French, then this might be indexed by the French versions of Bing or Google, and I’ll get French visitors. And enlighten their lives (well, I wouldn’t want then to miss anything!).
Here come the robots
I’d been reading (and hearing) lots about Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the past few months. Highlighted almost daily in the news, AI could be looked upon as the downfall of humanity etc. – hence the long strikes in America over digital and human rights concerning actors, writers and performers in general. But I thought that there’s a lot of good that could come out of it – enhanced medical diagnosis, better life enhancing tools etc.
So, I thought, what if it can do translations? If I fed an AI like ChatGPT a page of nonsense from my website, would it be able to translate it accurately into another language. And if it did translate it, how would I know if it was accurate?!
Research ensued. A lot of research ensued! Comparisons between different AI models, who thought they were accurate and who didn’t. That sort of thing.
After a few weeks of looking, musing and head-scratching, I made the decision to use ChatGPT as the AI, and I would use French as the target language.
Why French? Why not German, or Spanish?
As this post explains (the French Post), I studied (and failed) French at school. In my head, I (naively) thought that if I fed an AI a page of English, I would be able to tell if it was accurately translated into French. Because I’d studied French at school. Makes sense, right?
No. Far from it!
I mean I can recognise some of it (only because the English script is in front of me!), but nowhere near all of it (especially the longer posts) – and certainly not in conversational French.
Therein lies the dilemma. Do I feed the English in and trust what comes out as being accurate? Or do I say “non” to AI altogether and engage a paid translator?
I don’t know what the answer to that just yet.
A Proper Translation
I did request a translator to give me a quote to translate one post into French (she didn't reply, I think she thought I was mad) but I imagine it would be a quoted price per word, and that could work out to quite an amount, given my rambling bullshit. It would guarantee an accurate, verified translation, however.
It’s not as if the English site attracts much traffic (other than the myriad of Russian, Chinese and American hackers, trying to use my web space for something nefarious, no doubt), so I wouldn’t expect the French site to attract much either.
Conclusion
As I write this conclusion, The French site had been up and running for 18 weeks.
The conclusion (drawn from the Great French Experiment site statistics) was that although I had great fun working with AI and translating all of the posts, it didn’t really attract any footfall (apart from the aforementioned Chinese hackers) at all. OK, so you could say that I haven’t really given it enough time to establish itself, however it attracted 0 visitors.
On the plus side, it was great to get the experience working with AI and shocking to see some of the prices being charged for human translations! All in all, however: a good experience for me all round.
So the Great Experiment has been terminated and the French site decommissioned.
Shame, but c’est la vie! 😉