Simultaneous Interpreting (SI): the Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence – An SI Practitioner’s Perspective

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been become a household expression, especially in the past couple of years thanks to Google’s AI Computer program AlphaGo defeating a couple of world-class Go masters from Korea and China. In recent years, machines have surpassed humans in the performance of certain specific tasks, such as some aspects of image recognition. Although it is unlikely that machines will exhibit broadly-applicable intelligence comparable to or exceeding that of humans in the near future, experts forecast that rapid progress in the field of specialized AI will continue, with machines reaching and exceeding human performance on an increasing number of tasks. Simultaneous interpreting, being among the most complex of human cognitive/linguistic activities, with all the associated ergonomic elements, has been discussed profusely as one of the most likely to be taken over by AI in a couple of years. Given that so much has to be there simultaneously, i. e. anticipation, restoration of the implicit-explicit balance, and communicative re-packaging (‘re-ostension’1) of the discourse, simultaneous interpreting (SI) has yet to be fully explained, not the least the rich pragmatic information guiding the construction of the appropriate contexts and the speaker’s underlying intentionalities, which is the centre piece of SI, given the illusive nature of meaning assembly could be quite beyond even the most intelligent robots. This paper discusses what SI is like, how AI has evolved, and concludes that AI is dramatically changing the profession, but given the rule-based nature of AI driven by data and algorithms, human intelligence as possessed by SI practitioners is still irreplaceable. SI practitioners can harness cutting-edge technologies such as AI to do a better job, which bears significance for trainers and would be SIs