SoraNews24 —Japan News—

Another bang-up job from AI translation!

We haven’t really covered the recent and brief suspension of American late-night TV talk show host Jimmy Kimmel here on SoraNews24. Not that it’s not a topic worth discussing, but the intricacies of Kimmel’s acrimonious relationship with U.S. president Donald Trump, questions of what constitutes appropriate use of authority by the American Federal Communications Commission, and the myriad open and veiled motivations of broadcaster ABC, parent company Disney, and affiliate station owners Nexstar and Sinclair aren’t having a direct or significant effect on Japanese culture and society, which are our site’s primary areas of focus.

Something we do dabble in here on SoraNews24, though, is Japanese linguistics, and a recent episode of Kimmel’s now-reinstated show starts off with a call for his death, if you’re listening to the provided Japanese-language version of its dialogue.

Below is the official Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel’s upload of the opening monologue of the show’s September 25 episode, its third after coming back from being off the air for a week. It starts with announcer Lou Wilson making an energetic, but ordinary, proclamation: “Now, Jimmy Kimmel!”

Or, at least that’s what it says if you’re listening to it with the original audio. However, if you have the video’s audio set to Japanese, or even if you haven’t touched the settings but YouTube has decided it thinks you want the Japanese-dubbed version (say, for example, if you’re watching the video from somewhere in Japan), the very first thing you’ll hear is the announcer saying, “Saa, kare wo korose,” which means:

“Well now, kill him.”

Before anyone starts spinning conspiracy theories, it’s pretty clear that the culprit here isn’t Kimmel’s detractors in the Trump administration or the extreme-right media, but is actually YouTube itself, and that the reason this happened isn’t malice, but ignorance. YouTube is of the mindset that translation is something that can be left up to AI, as evidenced by its recent push to add auto-translated, auto-dubbed foreign language options to videos on the platform.

The problem is that AI doesn’t really know anything (hence the whole “artificial” part). A human being, even one who doesn’t speak a single word of English, would still be able to recognize that whatever the announcer in the video is saying, he’s definitely not saying “Well now, kill him,” since Kimmel than walks calmly out on stage with a warm smile to a clearly adoring audience. But YouTube’s AI translation program doesn’t see anything contradictory about pairing that cordial atmosphere with a command to take a man’s life, and a particularly aggressive one at that (korose is a more vulgar variant of the standard word for “kill,” koroshite).

As for how the AI translation program managed to proverbially poop itself so badly, the only thing that springs to mind is that it thought “Kimmel” sounded like “kill” and “him,” but that raises more concerns. The “ki” and “l” parts of “Kimmel,” which the AI seems to have interpreted as “kill,” wrap around the “imm” part that it appears to have translated as “him,” which would mean that the AI translation program not only couldn’t hear correctly, it also chopped up the word it was having trouble with and rearranged its parts to force-fit it into a phrase it had found somewhere else it’d scraped data from, then converted that jumbled-up mess into Japanese and presented it as the translation. A person’s name being a sticking point is also a huge red flag regarding the quality of automatic translations, since, again, names are something that human beings can recognize very easily through context, while AI will be tempted to bluff its way through a “translation” of vocabulary it couldn’t recognize, like a kid who was sleeping in class trying to B.S. his way through an answer when he gets called on by the teacher.

▼ “Mr. Tanaka! If a Shinkansen leaves Tokyo at 9:35 a.m., traveling at 320 kilometers per hour, but stops in Kyoto for 10 minutes so the conductor can buy some gold green Black Thunder, at what time will it reach Shin Iwakuni Station?”
“…uhhhh..kill Jimmy Kimmel…?”

The bronze lining to this (since the situation isn’t positive enough to warrant silver) is that this is just a talk show intro, and it’s unlikely that anyone watching the Japanese auto-dub is going to be swayed to actually try to murder Kimmel because the video told them to. However, the fact that auto-translating can go off the rails so spectacularly, and so quickly, is alarming, and if a similar mistake were to happen in auto-translating a speech from an influential political or religious leader, commanding viewers to enact violence against a person would be much less of a laughing matter. Also worth considering is that the “him” part of the “Well now, kill him” AI translation isn’t present at all in the original dialogue. If AI translation is simply guessing that it should throw in “him”, it could also guess that it should throw in “them,” expanding the target of the statement to an even wider group of people. This sort of mistake is something particularly likely when translating between Japanese and English, as the two languages have very different rules and customs regarding the use of pronouns and plural or singular forms of nouns.

Again, Kimmel’s life isn’t in any danger due to the absurdity of the translation error and the environment in which it appears. The real threat of reliance on, and acceptance of, AI translation lies in less ridiculous errors, things that might seem believable because they’re less dramatic than a direct call for blood or are coming from a source where the subject matter doesn’t make it obvious that something has gone wrong in the translation. “Kill the talk show host” is so far out here that it’s darkly comedic, but misattributed statements to the effect of “We need to expel people of Group X” or “There’s no need to take any precautions about Recalled Product Y” wouldn’t be so chuckle-worthy.

In short, always take AI translations, regardless of the language they’re coming from or going into, with a massive grain of salt.

Source: YouTube/Jimmy Kimmel Live
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso
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