Eight Hamlets of Translation: Training AI for School Tests
ago 26 2025
Consider this case: an artificial intelligence engine translating these high-school chemistry questions from English into other Languages:
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On a given diet yielding 3000 Kcal per day, a 70 kg man excretes 27.0g of urea daily. What percentage of his daily energy requirement is met by protein? Assume that gram of protein yields 4 Kcal and 0.16g of nitrogen as urea.
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Calculate the energy of a hydrogen atom in its ground state (n = 1) using the mass of the electron rather than the reduced mass of the hydrogen atom.
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Of course, any AI engine will be able to provide a translation. However, there is a critical issue: will it be reliable?
Our Brazilian translation agency was hired by a large global multilingual translation company to review AI-generated translations of hundreds of school questions, including the two examples above. The sole purpose was to feed the revision back into the AI system, in a kind of training process. The project involved several target languages, and we were assigned Spanish.
— What was the volume of the project?
According to the client, they had over 1 million words to be reviewed, covering various school subjects such as Math, Philosophy, Physics, Psychology, and more.
— One million words? What does it mean in terms of pages?
A typical book page contains about 400 words. By this measure, the material amounted to roughly 2,500 pages. For comparison, a standard edition of Hamlet has around 300 pages. That means the volume of material for reviewing corresponded to more than eight Shakespeare plays – only for training the AI in school questions!
Of course, this training had to be performed for dozens of target languages. Not to mention the same kind of training for other source languages, such as French, German, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, etc.
And then, the very same training is required in other domains, such as Business, Medicine, Engineering, etc.
A massive investment!
Whether or not this investment will bring profits, and who will actually earn these profits, is something nobody knows at this point.
Anyway, it is giving rise to a new kind of work for translators: machine training.
Well then – let’s get to it.
I am an engineer, physics teacher, translator, and writer. I am also director of LatinLanguages, a translation agency that provides multilingual companies with translation into Portuguese and Spanish. If you work with these languages, we are your best option—delivering world-class service at Brazilian prices.
Marcos Chiquetto
