DIRECT TALK(VISION VIBES)

Draft transcript

Chloe Potter / Host:

I'm Chloe Potter and this is Vision Vibes - the podcast that hopes to give you inspiration and tools to live a more satisfying life.

This story was originally broadcast on television as part of the interview series Direct Talk. If you enjoy listening, you can head to the NHK WORLD website to watch. You'll find interviews with people from all walks of life

I have always said that if I was ever lucky enough to be granted 3 genie wishes, then right at the top of the list would be the ability to speak every language in the world. I would love more than anything to be able to fluently communicate with everyone I meet, no matter our background, no matter our nationality, no matter our language. What a joy. What an education that would be.

According to one theory we all have a language compartment in our brains. Some of us are lucky enough to be born with a box that can retain multiple languages. Others only have the capacity for one additional language. I'm not sure I even have that. I'm always so impressed by my polyglot friends. Some of them speak more than 5 different languages! What an incredible skill. What a gift.

As a Londoner living in Japan I try every week to progress my rudimentary Japanese. I can say "hello," order in a café, I can direct a taxi but anything more complex than that and I'm generally still pretty stumped. It is such an obstacle in the way of leaning into this wonderful country and the enriching experience of living here.

Today's interviewee Jaroslaw Kutylowski runs a company that claims to offer us the most accurate translator in the world. Their website allows you to translate text in one language directly into another with just one click. It's particularly popular in Japan. Let's find out why.

Here is narrator Stuart Varnam Atkin. I'll meet you on the other side.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

Artificial intelligence translation is transforming communication.

Launched in 2017, the DeepL machine translation system currently supports 29 languages and provides highly accurate translations for even subtle nuances.

It has been used by more than one billion people and has raised the industry standards for machine translation even higher than the Tech Giants.

The CEO Dr. Jaroslaw Kutylowski, has developed the product as the technical director ever since the start-up phase.

How can AI translation help to solve the issues of modern society? Being at the forefront of the industry, what kind of future does Kutylowski envision?

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

I think there is a lot of problems in this world which stem from the fact that we do not understand each other, that we are, that we do not understand each other's culture, that we have just not grown up in the same places. While I'm pretty sure that not all of those problems can be solved if we're speaking the same language, I think if we can at least communicate in a way that we can exchange ideas and make us understand each other, then this goes pretty far in solving a lot of those problems.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

Cologne, Germany. The DeepL headquarters is here, a very long way from Silicon Valley.

The company employs about 300 people, including programmers, marketers, and experts handling multiple languages.

Language expert:

I'm a native speaker of Spanish. My first mother foreign language was English, then French, German. And then I started learning Polish, Portuguese, a bit of Italian, a bit of Greek. So, I try to, you know, move around all these languages. And I'm always very curious to learn languages from different language families, different alphabets, and very exotic ones.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

While AI translation can handle a variety of different fields, DeepL provides highly accurate translation systems by specializing in text translation. How exactly does it work?

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

Essentially, you can think of any neural network a little bit as of a human's brain. And at the beginning, this brain is pretty much untrained. It doesn't know what to do. It's the same as with our small children who come to this world and can't speak, can't do basically anything. And then we train this neural network, and we train it by showing a lot of examples of how translations could be done and as the neural network sees more and more translations, it learns how to do this. Every time it does translations in a good way, we're giving the neural network, or the AI, like positive feedback. And out of that, this huge mathematical machinery learns how to translate and become better and better at that.

That is just common and works for any language. So, I think, actually, if we had a language of an alien race, that could be also something that we could be able to train the AI to do if we had a proper set of translations to teach it to the AI. That's probably not there.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

DeepL is chosen by more than one billion people because of the high accuracy of its translations. What's the secret behind that accuracy?

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

What is very important with that is the design of how this artificial brain is connected together, how those connections are made, and therefore how the text is processed through the AI. And this is like what our researchers are working on daily and making sure that the processing is efficient and that therefore the AI can understand what the text is. And this is playing the most important role in how the quality advances are generated.

So, humans' role in advancing that is a very large. Yes.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

The wide range of use cases include the legal industry, where large amounts of text need to be translated, business applications such as cross-border e-commerce product introductions, and public agencies such as the United Nations.

As one example, the German national railway company, Deutsche Bahn has created an internal translation platform using DeepL. The company's 320,000 multinational employees around the world are now able to communicate effectively.

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

The most emotional comments come actually from users who use it for their personal life: for example, communicate with their family in a foreign country.

Previously there were instances where we just thought, "Oh, we won't write that email because it's just so cumbersome or we just purely can't." And now you can just do that. So, I think in general, probably the amount of communication has increased, but also the quality, and therefore the chances that your partner whom you're talking to is going to understand you. That's definitely a good thing, I'd say.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

If AI learns and evolves, it could perhaps do anything. What does Kutylowski think?

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

The quality and accuracy of translations done by AI has been increasing over the last years definitely. And this is going to continue. There is different use cases and for example, I think for conversations the AI will be becoming much better and better.

I think when it comes to poetry and art in general, a translation is not just the translation, it's also art by itself. So, I'm not sure whether it really makes that much sense to apply AI there. We want to see a human doing that. So, I think there's probably not going to be even that much focus on that topic. We don't think that we'll be able to help people with that.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

Will AI take away translators' jobs?

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

I think DeepL is usually applied in different use cases, and in those use cases where you wouldn't ask a translator for help. All of those situations where you'd like maybe to read a newspaper, or you'd like to quickly write that email. But asking a translator is obviously not feasible for that because it takes just too much time and it's maybe too expensive.

And on the other hand, it's transforming a translator's life. We have many, many customers who are professional translators, and their work is just so much more efficient. So, it's a lot of human and machine interaction there to get the best result most quickly.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

How does he feel about their small startup achieving more than the Tech Giants?

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

I'm proud! I think this is a very good example of how actually competition in the markets brings a specific field really forward and therefore helps people. So, I'm happy about the competition that we have, but I'm also happy about the fact that we are out there in this world and can advance this, this field so much.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

Jaroslaw Kutylowski was born in Poland in 1983. He grew up under the influence of his father, a professor of computer science.

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

I was first coding at I think I was 10 and therefore pretty quickly came to the conclusion that I want to build things that actually affects our lives somehow and, and which, which make a difference.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

Being placed in a multilingual environment also helped to guide his career.

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

The point in time where I was struggling most when my parents came to Germany and I didn't speak any German at all, and I went to school. So, I had to figure that out on my own. And we humans can do that. And especially if we are children, we can do that. This general understanding of what those problems are and how you learn languages and how important it is has also influenced me. It as an implicit reason why we started working on, on, on machine translation.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

After earning his doctorate in Computer Science from Paderborn University, Germany, he joined DeepL's predecessor, a translation website operator, as the technical director in 2012.

The first version of DeepL was developed in 2016 and released the following year.

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

Around 2017, the neural network revolution coming in and changing how AI can impact this, this world. And therefore, it was a combination of the possibility of doing there, but also seeing the necessity.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

As soon as DeepL was launched, it made headlines worldwide for raising the industry standards for translation accuracy. However, its early days were filled with difficulties.

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

I think we've just put a lot of mathematical work into what needed to be done and then also making sure that… DeepL is used by millions of people all around the world. So, we had to build up the data centers. This is quite a large logistical problem. We had to employ lots of people who helped us assessing the quality of our translations all around the world. So, finding them, finding ways of working together with them was quite a challenging task.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

They overcame the difficulties one by one and increased the number of languages supported. Among them, it was Japanese that broke through a major language barrier.

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

I've never seen such a large need for translation until coming to Japan, to be honest, there's actually countries where it's very, very hard to communicate in the set of languages that I know.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

DeepL was eager to meet the huge demand in Japan for a reliable translation tool. But it had to face a particular problem.

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

We had to cope with in the Japanese language, it is that words aren't separated by white space, which is common for Western languages, and which a lot of our systems have based on at the beginning. And then we had to rework that and correct that to accommodate for the Japanese language. And kind of makes it necessary for us to work in a slightly different way with the text.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

Overcoming such problems, the company began providing highly accurate translations and became very popular. Japan now uses the DeepL service more than any other country.

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

When people say that now they're happy to communicate and able to communicate, that warm our hearts at the end. And we are, we are hearing a lot of those stories. And every time we hear those, we are very happy about them.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

As AI translation continues to evolve, will it become unnecessary for children to learn foreign languages as they grow up?

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

I don't think so. I actually think that learning languages gives, it's a great tool um, to train our minds. And it's the same as with learning maths at school or learning calculation. Um, even though there's perfect tools out there which can offload the task of us. It's very, very important that we do that.

I have two children, and I'm very happy that they're learning foreign languages and with every advancements they make, I'm proud of them.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

Does he think the overwhelming dominance of the English language will also change?

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

I don't actually have a good answer for this question, to be honest. I don't know. It might be that through tools like DeepL, the importance of understanding another language will be less. So then, maybe more communication can go directly between Japanese and German, for example, without us speaking English as the intermediary language. But then on the other hand, if everybody is focusing more on English, just as this kind of language and the tools are also great for translating into English, I think it's going to be hard to actually change that dominant language because it's been now so established for so many years.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

Through AI translation, Kutylowski confronts the communication challenges faced by the human race. In its own way, DeepL is also trying to confront a challenge the whole world faces today: war.

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

We have fast tracked the development of our Ukrainian language and have released this some weeks ago only in order to make people understand each other better here in Europe now in this situation of, of crisis. Um so, I hope with that, at least we are contributing a little bit to, to how people deal with, with the war.

I do not think that nationalism will get us anywhere as humanity. And I think I am looking at this with growing anxiousness, um, actually, and hope that the world and as people will kind of get over this, this phase.

Stuart Varnam-Atkin / Narrator:

What is the motto he has never wavered from?

Jaroslaw Kutylowski:

So, this is our motto. It's, "Breaking down language barriers!"

We are focused on making sure that everybody can communicate and that's like, that's like breaking down language barriers! It just says everything!

Chloe Potter / Host:

Just picture a world without any language barriers; the possibilities, the relationships, both personal and political and the deeper understanding between different cultures. If the advances made by DeepL AI are anything to go by it seems human ingenuity is going to make this a reality: my genie wish come true.

In the meantime, I promise I will continue to plug away at my Japanese lessons because Jaroslaw is right about that too: the act of learning a language is an enriching process. I do feel I have learnt so much about Japan by studying the language. It's not just the words and their meanings it's the underlying implication that often teaches me something about the Japanese perspective. I love for example how the verb "to own" is the same as the verb "to hold." How wise. To think of every object you buy or acquire as something that adds to the weight you have to hold in your arms. A wonderful reminder of what really matters and to travel lightly through life.

That's it for today's episode. Thank you for listening. You can find the transcript, as well as our other stories, on the NHK WORLD website. I'm Chloe Potter, join us next time for more mind-expanding insights from inspiring people on Vision Vibes.