Museums' Use of Natural Language Processing

Written by Kate Maffey

How are museums translating their material?

Natural Language Processing is used by a variety of institutions, including the fine arts. For a review on its origins and use, read this article. Many museums are employing professional translation services. For instance, the Field Museum in Chicago uses a company called Multilingual Connections, and the Denver Botanical Gardens, South Florida Science Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art use a company called Eriksen Translation. That is, museums must pay for professional human translators in order to offer material in multiple languages. When the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, in 2015, translated materials so that they could engage more with Latino visitors, they decided to exclusively use human translations rather than machine translation because they wanted to ensure that their materials were true to the “spirit of the words,” not just that it offered visitors the gist of the material. 

While the examples provided are exclusive to the United States, it seems that European countries use a similar model of hiring professional translators – two contract bidding announcements by the Museum of the Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and the Museum of Bastia in France demonstrate that human translation is still the industry standard in Europe as well. 

A great illustration of the current state of machine translation as useful but not quite good enough comes in an announcement for a translation sprint. Europeana Pro is an organization funded by the European Union that is dedicated to preserving and promoting cultural heritage. In their 2020 invitation to join sprint to translate foundational documents into more languages, the organizers of the sprint instructed participants to use a number of machine translation tools only “as long as you review the resulting text.” This instruction underlines the themes explored by this article: machine translation is good, but not yet good enough for professional use without human review.

Figure 1: Black and white photos in a gallery. Source: Unsplash.

How will museums be affected when machine translation achieves parity with human translation?

Machine translation clearly is not yet good enough – but how could it change once the technology catches up to the need? User experience is naturally a priority for museums, and translation is an integral part of that. There are many museums in America that could better serve their non-English-speaking populations by expanding their offerings. And it is not just in serving their visitors; museums could also benefit greatly from better machine translation for their collections. A team of researchers from Beijing Jiaotong University used machine translation to evaluate ancient Chinese texts and translate them into English, demonstrating the promise of machine translation as a way to preserve and expand collection offerings. A research group based out of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) has a program dedicated to using automated translation to analyze and understand cuneiform languages on a series of tablets from southern Mesopotamia. A widely-used museum database software called Axiell has multilingual fields embedded in its data structures, and offers an automated translation tool so that curators have some idea of what they are looking at, even if it is in a language they do not understand.

Another team of researchers commented on translation in museums as a narrative and a means by which to convey identity. They explore how bad translation can be seen as a failure of the museum and argue that the quality of the translation not only has an impact on the museum, but also on the message that the museum wants to convey. A professor and researcher from the United Kingdom synthesized the benefits of translation for museums into two central themes: economic value and social inclusivity. However, given that a professional translation service is often required, that is currently not always an option for museums. 

While professional translation services are the norm, some museums are starting to explore machine translation as a potential tool. The Computer History Museum conducted an experiment with artificial intelligence during which they used machine translation on a number of their audio and video files. While it is unclear if they have put it into effect so far, they underscored many of the points made in this article by commenting that machine translation promises to make museums and collections “more accessible to speakers of languages other than English.” 

All of this evidence points to the potential disruption and change that could occur for museums when machine translation becomes a ubiquitous option for professional-level translation. Besides machine translation’s promise of museums’ ability to better serve communities in America, the international museum industry also thrives off the ability to offer people a window into culture and identity that isn’t possible without accurate translations. The significant reduction of costs that would occur if machine translation improved would offer museums the ability to broaden their offerings and expand their visitor experience beyond their current capabilities.

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