Translation in InDesign

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

Note: Cross-posting for better user feedback and visibility.

Adobe Express now has built-in AI translation services for their product. Why is this not available in InDesign?

I'm not expecting 100% accuracy, we have translators to proof results, but this would be so much more efficient as a first-pass instead of exporting IDML to send to a service or through Trados software.

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests/suggestions/47440610-ai...

[Eugene Tyson]

Hopefully, if it's in 1 thing it will be pushed to other apps - I think AI image creation was one of those things pushed to Express first then pushed to the apps next. Maybe wrong on that. 

[Jemmarie Bocalbos]

+1 need please

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Because AX is a bleeding-edge cloud-based integrated app, and ID is a twenty-year-old standalone platform that is not handling cloud features very well.

No question it would be useful, but so would all-wheel drive in a '65 Volkswagen bug. 🙂

The solution is obvious but I see no sign of it being considered.

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

@James Gifford—NitroPress but yet lets throw Generative AI image generation into a document layout program. Cause that makes sense for any managed workflow. (kidding/sarcasm)

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

One of my colleagues is a noted expert on the social/implemenation/use aspects of AI. He is exasperated beyond words at how every company on earth is getting Friggin' Ay-Eye into every facet of every product, whether it makes the slightest bit of sense or not.

Anyone remember the brief era when it was possible to make any item with a power source "talk"? Until everything with a power source did?

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

@James Gifford—NitroPress lol exactly.

[Joel Cherney]

I promise you, it would not be more efficient as a first pass.

MT connectors already exist for Trados. Those MT engines use last-gen neural AI translation tech. You could first-pass your translation through Trados, without a problem. And I can understand the desirability of having that within one's layout app, which we can't really do with InDesign today.

But the main reason you're not seeing generative AI connectors for brand new MT engines to plug into your Trados or your memoQ or whatever is quite simple: genAI is absolute trash for comprehensible, meaningful translation. Worse than the last-gen MT tech. Worse than the statistical garbage we lived with before neural nets became the latest greatest AI craze. You'll see in-language chatbots using genAI, of course (at least in some easy languages), but for straight translation? Like, "here's the instructions for taking this medication in English; I need 'em in Spanish, Russian, and Vietnamese"? Last-gen AI tech still does a much, much better job at the actual job of translation. It also doesn't expose you to lawsuits the way that genAI would cause your readership to e.g. accidentally fatally overdose themselves. 

When you see the big MT vendors offering MT engines based on The Latest Greatest AI, that's when you know that it's safe to migrate. If e.g. Systran's MT engine is still based off of neural AI, there's a very good reason for that. 

I've lived through two AI winters already (I learned Prolog in the 1980s, if that is meaningful to you) and to be perfectly direct, I cannot wait until it's time to hunker down in front of the fire for my third AI winter. 

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

@Joel Cherney we already use Trados in our translation dept. but there is a cost associated with that. Having it in InDesign natively could be a like-for-like but less expensive option for a first pass if using the proper translation engine.

I also understand that while this cant be done in InDesign today I have submitted to user voice for possible future enhancement.

To your second point, if AI generated translation is such "trash" - why did Adobe put it front and center in Express? If this utterly fails with the results, users will obviously off-ramp to another solution, again like Trados.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

You get what you pay for, especially in subtle, complex services like translation. I have lost count of the times I was given some cheap "My uncle speaks German" translations to work with, that ended up getting hoots from the target audience. I'll be leery of AI translations that are not reviewed by a fully fluent, topic-competent human for a very, very long time. (I mean, we all have stories of a wetware translator who made some idiotic mistake, especially to/from Asian languages!)

As for why Adobe shoehorned it into AX... well, gosh, let's think. Why does GM chrome bumpers and Kellogg's offer 20% more Sugar Bombs for free?

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

Again as I stated in my first post - this is meant as a first pass. Not final publicated translation.

Trados is a good comparison - integrate somthing at that level into InDesign natively.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Maybe. I am even more leery of such "first pass"/approximation services because some large number of users won't go to step two. It just enables... substandard work. Canva et al. already have a huge jump on that.

Integrate? You mean like Pantone? <gd&r>

[Joel Cherney]

Maybe. I am even more leery of such "first pass"/approximation services because some large number of users won't go to step two. It just enables... substandard work.

Are you, like, looking in my inbox or something?  You'll never guess what kind of cleanup job I'm currently avoiding right now.  A hint: I'm cleaning up substandard work, but I can't say that "I'm cleaning up someone's substandard work" because that would require a thinking, feeling human to have been part of the production of said work. 

[Joel Cherney]

Perhaps I wasn't overt enough in my broad slam of generative AI. GenAI does a pretty decent job on marketing speech, where neither truth nor accuracy are important. It sounds really natural, when it tells you that "you can keep the cheese from falling off your pizza by using wood glue." Okay, Google's AI web search is worse than some other genAI tools; the point is that people who aren't thoughtful translation consumers will be fooled into beliving that, because the translation reads really well, and sounds really natural, that it must be a good translation. This is not the case. I'm confident that you already know this.

So, if you're paying attention, you're seeing pretty decent multilingual customer support from genAI chatbots, among other perfectly valid uses of genAI in multilingual communications. My example was "how to take this medication" which is not marketing speech. If the genAI gets it wrong, somebody's grandmother accidentally poisons herself with her heart medication, or whatever. I don't think anyone is making prescription medication instructions in Adobe Express... at least, I hope not. But we are doing that kind of work in InDesign.

The feature you're asking for makes some sense, here. You'd like a one-click "Auto-Translate this Document." You'd know perfectly well that you can't trust that one-click auto-translate to keep somebody's gramma from poisoning themselves. (Not everyone would be so cognizant, I assure you.)  But it would make a bunch of workflows much easier & faster to operate, sure, I get it. And, given that genAI is the Flavor of the Month, you could concievably put that feature request in and the InDesign devs would say "Oh boy, here is another opportunity to make ourselves look good in front of the C-suite by implementing another genAI thing, which we know they just love to see." 

Then it'd be trash. 

(I've not toyed around with AI translation in AX, but I will. It's probably better than I'd expect. It's also probably not as good as the MT you already have. It's also - I'm going out on a limb, here - probably not going to save you either time or money. Your post-MT editors are going to complain about the quality of the content, and they'll be editing it in a graphic design app, instead of a tool in a translation management system that is build to cater to the working methods of translators and editors instead of graphic designers.)

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

[...] I also understand that while this cant be done in InDesign today [...] 

By @Kevin Stohlmeyer

Doable, but I can make it to work only on Windows - for "direct" use. 

[Joel Cherney]

You know, it hadn't occurred to me that Rober's ID-Tasker could do this, but I'm sure that it can. I'd actually come back here to post about Ariel's Translate add-on, because I knew that it offered translations powered by DeepL as an option. A few days after the last post in this thread, DeepL announced that they were offering a new translation engine based off of their own large langauge model. Previously, I'd suggested to people that they use DeepL specifically because they overtly said "We use neural AI engines for our translation tools". This kind of thing neatly sidestepped my grave concerns regarding the way that generative AI tends to be build on a foundation of, well, muck. Trash. Scraping the Internet for the guts of one's AI. That's why I feel there are so many problems with translation driven by genAI; the language models they're built on are just not up to the task. 

Anyhow, if you'd like to see some details, it's all covered over at DeepL's announcement on their blog. They based their in-house LLM not on stuff harvested from the Internet and graded by armies of recent college grads, but on their own multilingual corpora... that they've been carefully grooming for the entire duration of their existence.  That is entirely unlike every other translation-offering LLM I've looked at. 

Long story short, @Kevin Stohlmeyer , you can get access to one-click AI-driven translation of InDesign documents. But, since DeepL's LLM isn't available to API users (which is what you'd be if you licensed Ariel's tool... likewise Robert's tool, which looks like it uses Google Translate as its provider), you'd be getting one-click neural-AI based translations, which I honestly believe for Reasons Stated Above to be more reliable, across the board. At least today!