How Google Translate learned Inuktut

While on the phone, Suzie Napayok-Short translates a phrase from English to Inuktut for the very first time using Google Translate. 

Napayok-Short is an author and translator who owns Tusaajiit Translations. She provides simultaneous Inuktitut interpretation for the NWT Legislative Assembly and handles the translation of reports and documents for several other organizations. 

She types the words “legally, my hands are tied” into the text box and the software spits out “Maligatigut aggakka qilaksimavut,” which Napayok-Short says translates literally as “legally, my hands are tied up with rope.”

Despite translating the turn of phrase literally instead of the figurative meaning, Napayok-Short says she’s impressed by how close it comes to an accurate translation.

Last week, Google announced its translation program is now available in Inuktut – the family of languages spoken by more than 39,000 Inuit in Canada. 

This is the first Indigenous language spoken in Canada to be featured on the platform.

Napayok-Short said she isn’t worried about the new addition to the platform changing the nature of her work.

“You can use it for a word or two, but the structure of Inuit is so different from English structure that I don’t think it can ever really be automated into becoming a real translation,” said Napayok-Short.

When she’s interpreting and translating, Napayok-Short often tries to adhere to the customs of the language.

“I don’t like it to be verbatim, which happens a lot,” says Napayok-Short.

She explained that in her language, the person speaking is of least importance and is put last in the sentence. 

In Inuktitut, the phrase “I’m going to the store” would roughly become “the store is the location to which go I now.”

“‘I’ is at the end of our thought. The main idea is that the store is the location that I will be attending to, it’s never I or me first. You see, it’s our world view,” says Napayok-Short.

“This is how we see our world, we are as equal to our environment and our climate and the wildlife, because that’s who we depend on for each other’s survival.”

When you think of a language so directly tied to nature and the cultural context of Inuit, it’s hard to imagine it being recreated by a large language model – artificial intelligence – in Palo Alto, California. That’s what Google Translate’s team says it has done. 

Isaac Caswell is the senior software engineer who founded the project at Google four years ago. 

“I’ve always viewed the preservation and support of struggling languages as very important,” says Caswell. 

Caswell is Irish. While he didn’t grow up in Ireland, he has family members in a part of the country where Irish is still spoken.

“Since I was young, I was associated with a language that was under threat,” says Caswell, “and the value of supporting languages – and the value of languages and culture – was always apparent to me.”

In his career with Google Translate, he says he has focused on what he referred to as lower-resource languages – languages with less presence online, making it harder to train a large language model to translate them. 

That’s one of the reasons Inuktuk was chosen. There are a large number of professionally translated documents from Nunavut government proceedings available online, which can help train the language model.

Once Caswell and a colleague established a base model for the service, they reached out to Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK) for feedback on the quality of the translations.

ITK is the national organization that represents the interests of Inuit people in Canada.

Up until that point, the model worked in syllabics, the way that Inuktuk has traditionally been written. With ITK’s input, the engineers made the service available in Latin script as well as syllabics. 

In recent years, ITK has been promoting the use of Inuktut Qaliujaaqpait, which it describes as a common set of characters that can be used to write any dialect of Inuktut. 

ITK had no representative available to speak with Cabin Radio but, in a press release, president Natan Obed wrote: “The addition of Inuktut on such a widely used platform empowers Inuit to interact more fully in the digital world.”

ITK senior communications advisor Jesse Fraser told the CBC that perhaps in the future, users will be able to choose the Inuktut dialect in which they would like text translated.

Caswell says he hopes the tool could eventually become helpful to translators and potentially act as a reference. 

“It could also be helpful for language learning efforts, for people who are on the edge of the community, trying to become part of it,” said Caswell. 

While speaking of the potential benefits of the service, Caswell was reminded of his uncle in Ireland who uses Google to translate every webpage he reads into Irish. 

“My uncle, even though he is fluent in English, he sort-of refuses to accept English as the language of the country, so he makes his experience of the world as Irish as possible,” says Caswell.

He added that this tool could make it easier for people to give themselves a more immersive experience in their own language, even if they can speak other languages.

Google’s stated mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. 

“I think it’s our responsibility to make it accessible and useful and welcoming for people of historically marginalized communities,” says Caswell.

“The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been very overlooked and mistreated by systems of power for a long time. So I think this is a small, small way in which we can fulfill our responsibility to these people.”