《经济学人》Espresso 应用程序的预览，以及《经济学人》高级编辑、人工智能项目的路德维希·西格尔。图片来源：《经济学人》
The Economist has deployed AI-translated content on its budget-friendly “snack-sized” app Espresso after deciding the technology had reached the “good enough” mark.
《经济学人》在其经济实惠的“快餐式”应用程序 Espresso 上部署了人工智能翻译内容，因为他们认为该技术已经达到了“足够好”的标准。
Ludwig Siegele, senior editor for AI initiatives at The Economist, told Press Gazette that AI translation will never be a “solved problem”, especially in journalism because it is difficult to translate well due to its cultural specificities.
《经济学人》人工智能项目的高级编辑路德维希·西格尔告诉《新闻公报》，人工智能翻译永远不会是一个“解决的问题”，尤其是在新闻报道中，因为由于文化特性，翻译很难做到准确。
However he said it has reached the point where it is good enough to have introduced AI-powered, in-app translations in French, German, Mandarin and Spanish on The Economist’s “bite-sized”, cut-price app Espresso (which has just over 20,000 subscribers).
然而，他表示，人工智能翻译已经达到了足够好的水平，因此在《经济学人》的“快餐式”、低价应用程序 Espresso 中引入了法语、德语、普通话和西班牙语的人工智能驱动的应用内翻译（该应用程序的订阅用户刚刚超过 20,000 人）。
Espresso has also just been made free to high school and university students aged 16 and older globally as part of a project by The Economist to make its journalism more accessible to audiences around the world.
Espresso 还刚刚对全球 16 岁及以上的高中和大学学生免费开放，作为《经济学人》使其新闻报道更易于全球受众获取的项目的一部分。
Siegele said that amid “lots of hype” about AI, the questions to ask are: “What is it good for? Does it work? And does it work with what we’re trying to do?”
西格尔表示，在关于人工智能的“大量炒作”中，应该问的问题是：“它有什么用？它有效吗？它是否与我们正在尝试做的事情相符？”
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He added that the project to make The Economist’s content “more accessible to more people” via Espresso was a “good point to start”.
他补充说，通过 Espresso 使《经济学人》的内容“对更多人更易获取”的项目是一个“良好的起点”。
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“The big challenge of AI is the technology, at least for us, is not good enough,” he continued. “It’s interesting, but to really develop a product, I think in many cases, it’s not good enough yet. But in that case, it worked.
“人工智能的最大挑战是技术，至少对我们来说，还不够好，”他继续说道。“这很有趣，但要真正开发出一个产品，我认为在许多情况下，它还不够好。但在这种情况下，它有效。”
“I wouldn’t say that translation is a solved problem, it is never going to be a solved problem, especially in journalism, because journalism is really difficult to translate. But it’s good enough for that type of content.”
“我不会说翻译是一个已解决的问题，它永远不会成为一个已解决的问题，尤其是在新闻领域，因为新闻真的很难翻译。但对于那种类型的内容来说，它已经足够好了。”
The Economist is using AI translation tool DeepL alongside its own tech on the backend.
《经济学人》正在使用 AI 翻译工具 DeepL，并在后台与自己的技术一起使用。
“It’s quite complicated,” Siegele said. “The translation is the least of it at this point. The translation isn’t perfect. If you look at it closely it has its quirks, but it’s pretty good. And we’re working on a kind of second workflow which makes it even better.”
“这相当复杂，”Siegele 说。“翻译在这一点上是最不重要的。翻译并不完美。如果你仔细看，它有一些怪癖，但还不错。我们正在进行一种第二个工作流程，使其变得更好。”
The AI-translated text is not edited by humans because, Siegele said, the “workflow is so tight” on Espresso which updates around 20 times a day.
Siegele 说，AI 翻译的文本没有经过人工编辑，因为“Espresso 的工作流程非常紧凑”，每天更新约 20 次。
“There is no natural thing where we can say ‘okay, now everything is done. Let’s translate, and let’s look at the translations and make sure they’re perfect’. That doesn’t work… The only thing we can do is, if it’s really embarrassing, we’ll take it down and the next version in 20 minutes will be better.”
“没有一种自然的方式可以说‘好吧，现在一切都完成了。让我们翻译，并查看翻译，确保它们是完美的’。这行不通……我们能做的唯一事情是，如果真的很尴尬，我们会把它撤下，下一版在 20 分钟内会更好。”
One embarrassing example, Siegele admitted, is that the tool turned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz into a woman.
Siegele 承认，一个尴尬的例子是，该工具将德国总理奥拉夫·肖尔茨翻译成了女性。
But Siegele said a French reader has already got in touch to say: “I don’t read English. This is great. Finally, I can read The Economist without having to put it into Google Translate and get bad translations.”
但 Siegele 说，一位法国读者已经联系说：“我不读英语。这太好了。终于，我可以阅读《经济学人》，而不必把它放到谷歌翻译中得到糟糕的翻译。”
The Economist’s AI-translated social videos
《经济学人》的 AI 翻译社交视频
The Economist simultaneously launched AI-translated videos on its social platforms in the same four languages.
《经济学人》同时在其社交平台上推出了四种语言的 AI 翻译视频。
The videos are all a maximum of 90 seconds meaning it is not too much work to check them – crucial as, unlike the Espresso article translations, they are edited by humans (native language speakers working for The Economist) taking about 15 minutes per video.
这些视频最长为 90 秒，这意味着检查它们的工作量不大——这很关键，因为与 Espresso 的文章翻译不同，它们是由人类（为《经济学人》工作的母语者）编辑的，每个视频大约需要 15 分钟。
For the videos The Economist is using AI video tool Hey Gen. Siegele said: “The way that works is you give them the original video and they do a provisional translation and then you can proofread the translation. So whereas the translations for the app are basically automatic – I mean, we can take them down and we will be able to change them, but at this point, they’re completely automatic – videos are proofread, and so in this way we can make sure that the translations are really good.”
In addition they are using “voice clones” which means journalists who speak in a video have some snippets of themselves given to Hey Gen to build and that is used to create the finished product.
The voice clones are not essential, Siegele explained, as translations can be done automatically regardless. Journalists can opt out of having their voices used in this way, and any data stored will be deleted if the employee leaves The Economist. But the clones do mean the quality is “much better”.
They have a labelling system for the app articles and videos that can show they are “AI translated” or “AI transformed”. But, Siegele said, they are “not going to have a long list of AI things we may have used to build this article for brainstorming or fact checking or whatever, because in the end it’s like a tool, it’s like Google search. We are still responsible, and there’s almost always a human except for edge cases like the Espresso translations or with podcast transcripts…”
Economist ‘will be strategic’ when choosing how to roll out AI
Asked whether the text translation could be rolled out to more Economist products, Siegele said: “That’s of course a goal but it remains to be seen.”
He said that although translation for Espresso is automated, it would not be the goal to do the same throughout The Economist.
He also said they still have to find out if people are “actually interested” and if they can “develop a translation engine that is good enough”.
“But I don’t think we will become a multi-linguistic, multi-language publication anytime soon. We will be much more strategic with what we what we translate… But I think there is globally a lot of demand for good journalism, and if the technology makes it possible, why not expand the access to our content?
“If it’s not too expensive – and it was too expensive before. It’s no longer.”
Other ways The Economist is experimenting with AI, although they have not yet been implemented, include a style bot and fact-checking.
Expect to see “some kind of summarisation” of articles, Siegele continued, “which probably will go beyond the five bullet points or three bullet points you increasingly see, because that’s kind of table stakes. People expect that. But there are other ways of doing it”.
He also suggested some kind of chatbot but “not an Economist GPT – that’s difficult and people are not that interested in that. Perhaps more narrow chatbots”. And said versioning, or repurposing articles for different audiences or different languages, could also follow.
“The usual stuff,” Siegele said. “There’s only so many good ideas out there. We’re working on all of them.” But he said he wants colleagues to come up with solutions to their problems rather than him as “the AI guy” imposing things.
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