Poll: Will AI increase demand for human cultural consultants? Initiator des Themas: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Will AI increase demand for human cultural consultants?".
This poll was originally submitted by Ana Moirano. View the poll results »
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Presumably, until AI comes up with a cultural consultant agent…
| | | | Hipyan Nopri 
Indonesien
Local time: 14:13
Englisch > Bahasa Indonesia
+ ...
| Fluent but Culturally Blind: Why AI Still Needs Human Cultural Expertise | Oct 16 |
I voted “Yes, AI output is culturally blind,” and I believe this weakness will increase, rather than reduce, demand for human cultural consultants.
AI tools produce text from statistical patterns, not from lived cultural experience. As a result, their output often reads smoothly while missing connotation, register, politeness conventions, humor, and local sensitivities. The danger lies precisely in that fluency: because the text looks polished, clients may not realize that it is... See more I voted “Yes, AI output is culturally blind,” and I believe this weakness will increase, rather than reduce, demand for human cultural consultants.
AI tools produce text from statistical patterns, not from lived cultural experience. As a result, their output often reads smoothly while missing connotation, register, politeness conventions, humor, and local sensitivities. The danger lies precisely in that fluency: because the text looks polished, clients may not realize that it is inappropriate or misleading for the target audience until the damage is done.
In legal translation, for example, terms rooted in the common law tradition often have no direct equivalent in a civil law system such as Indonesia’s. An AI tool may supply a dictionary match that looks correct but carries a different legal meaning or effect in the target jurisdiction. Recognizing that gap requires an understanding of both legal cultures, not just both languages.
As AI-generated content becomes more widespread, clients will increasingly need professionals who can verify whether a text is not only accurate but also culturally and contextually appropriate. In my view, the role of the human expert is shifting from producing every word to safeguarding meaning, tone, and trust. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Thayenga
Deutschland
Local time: 09:13
Mitglied (2009)
Englisch > Deutsch
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Yawning and yawning and again...yawning.
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Thayenga
Deutschland
Local time: 09:13
Mitglied (2009)
Englisch > Deutsch
+ ...
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida wrote:
Presumably, until AI comes up with a cultural consultant agent…
It must be an AI generated cultural consultant agent.
Else, where would the fun, eh, the boredom of it?
| | | | Philip Lees
Griechenland
Local time: 10:13
Griechisch > Englisch
Hipyan Nopri wrote:
AI tools produce text from statistical patterns, not from lived cultural experience.
Doesn't lived cultural experience show statistical patterns? If not, why not?
As a result, their output often reads smoothly while missing connotation, register, politeness conventions, humor, and local sensitivities.
I think you've failed to notice the advances in the capabilities of LLMs over the last couple of years. I've had conversations with ChatGPT in which it makes humorous remarks that take into account the fact that I grew up in England in the 1950s-60s.
As for connotation, etc., I remember one such conversation in which we segued smoothly from calcium carbide bicycle lamps, via alternative meanings of the word "pong", to assembly language programming for the Sinclair Spectrum home computer in the 1980s. I'd call that pretty versatile.
[Edited to compensate for the fact that the "Preview" option in this horrid new version doesn't actually show you how your post will look, but adds extra spacing. It is thus useless as a preview (how surprising - not!)]
[Edited at 2026-10-17 04:57 GMT]
| | | | Hipyan Nopri
Indonesien
Local time: 14:13
Englisch > Bahasa Indonesia
+ ...
| Fluency is not accuracy: an example from legal translation | 06:17 |
Philip Lees wrote:
Doesn't lived cultural experience show statistical patterns? If not, why not?
I think you've failed to notice the advances in the capabilities of LLMs over the last couple of years.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, Philip. You raise two fair points.
On statistical patterns: You are right that lived cultural experience leaves statistical traces in language. My point is narrower: a model learns from the textual record of experience, not from the experience itself, and that record is very unevenly distributed. English, especially British and American culture, is vastly overrepresented compared with a language like Indonesian. Where the patterns are sparse, they cannot be reliably reproduced.
On your conversations with ChatGPT: I agree that the progress has been remarkable. But your examples involve British cultural references discussed in English, which is close to the best case for these models. They say little about how LLMs handle Indonesian honorifics or the gap between common-law and Indonesian civil-law concepts. Translation is also less forgiving than conversation. It is bound to a specific source text, audience, and purpose, and a fluent but subtly wrong rendering is more dangerous than an awkward one because it is less likely to be caught.
So let me refine my original statement. My concern is not that LLMs cannot handle connotation or humor. It is that they do so inconsistently and give no reliable signal of when they have failed.
I have also edited client documents that had previously been translated with an AI tool, and in my experience such texts require especially close review. In one of them, “omission to act” had been rendered as kelalaian bertindak. It reads smoothly, but the English term is neutral: it denotes the absence of an act, whether or not there was a duty to act. The duty determines the legal consequences, not whether the conduct counts as an omission. Kelalaian, however, means negligence and already implies fault. A neutral rendering such as tidak berbuat would have been more accurate. The fluent version silently turned a description of conduct into a finding of fault.
This is why, at least for English–Indonesian legal texts, I believe careful human review still makes the difference.
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