Poll: Will AI increase demand for human cultural consultants? Autor de la hebra: 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 
Indonesia
Local time: 03:20
inglés al indonesio
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| 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
Alemania
Local time: 22:20
Miembro 2009
inglés al alemán
+ ...
Yawning and yawning and again...yawning.
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Thayenga
Alemania
Local time: 22:20
Miembro 2009
inglés al alemán
+ ...
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 be the fun, eh, the boredom of it?
[Edited at 2026-10-17 08:44 GMT]
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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
Indonesia
Local time: 03:20
inglés al indonesio
+ ...
| Fluency is not accuracy: an example from legal translation | Oct 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.
| | | | | Will AI Increase the Demand for Human Cultural Consultants? | Oct 17 |
AI is becoming more common in our daily lives, but can it truly understand different cultures? While AI can provide information about traditions, languages, and social norms, human cultural consultants bring real-life experience and a deeper understanding of cultural values. As AI continues to grow, will the need for human cultural consultants increase, or will AI eventually replace them? What do you think?
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Thayenga
Alemania
Local time: 22:20
Miembro 2009
inglés al alemán
+ ...
Philip Lees wrote:
[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]
Just don't use it.
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Hipyan Nopri wrote:
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.
I accept that the English language (and associated cultures) are overrepresented in information systems. What I was getting at, though, was something else. When you bring your personal knowledge and experience to bear on a translation issue, is this not based on your own "statistical sampling" of culture, derived from your personal lived experience? So how is that different from what the AI is doing?
You may currently have a broader and deeper knowledge of Indonesian culture than the most popular LLMs do—i.e. a much larger statistical sample—but for how much longer?
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.
I don't know how the penetration of Greek culture (population ~11 million) compares with that of Indonesian (population ~280 million), but ChatGPT does very well with the Greek language, including variants. See another recent post of mine for an example. It also "understands" the workings of Greek bureaucracy quite well.
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. ... This is why, at least for English–Indonesian legal texts, I believe careful human review still makes the difference.
I agree that human review is still essential for many AI translations. But that applies to now, late 2026. AI has seen huge development over the last 2 years, and that development appears to be continuing, or even accelerating.
Let me make it clear that I do not like this situation, as a translator, and I am certainly not an advocate for these developments: but I think we have to face facts. The limitations you mention that make LLMs still unreliable as producers of final-version translations will gradually be overcome - I predict within another 2 years. By that time, the profession of "translator", as we know it today, will have disappeared - except for a few very small niche areas.
If you find this hard to deal with, then "Don't Look Up".
[Edited at 2026-10-18 05:42 GMT]
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Thayenga wrote:
Philip Lees wrote:
[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!)]
Just don't use it.
Well, yes. You can use it, but just allow for the fact that "Preview" only applies in its loosest, most general sense in this case.
It's odd, because as a programmer it seems to me that it would be harder to get this wrong (as ProZ has managed to do) than to get it right.
| | | | Daryo
Local time: 21:20
serbio al inglés
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| 'Beginner's luck' - kind of ...? | Oct 18 |
Philip Lees wrote:
Thayenga wrote:
Philip Lees wrote:
[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!)]
Just don't use it.
Well, yes. You can use it, but just allow for the fact that "Preview" only applies in its loosest, most general sense in this case.
It's odd, because as a programmer it seems to me that it would be harder to get this wrong (as ProZ has managed to do) than to get it right.
Advance warning: sarcasm intended.
Call it 'beginner's luck'?
It reminds me of some nonsensical 'translations' I had to check in the past - had I tried on purpose to sabotage those translations I would have never been able to come up with the 'pearls' I found in them. Never underestimate beginners' capacity for 'creativity'...
On a more positive note this 'new User Interface' is at least trying to improve. Still, can't see what was the urgent need to dis-improve it in the first place.
Not that bad compared it with the new version of Kudoz ('improved downward' a year or two ago) where the 'preview' option has simply vanished ... As in 'one step forward' [you can now add pictures in Kudoz] assorted with ‘few steps back’ [no preview at all, clumsy choice of font sizes, etc ...]
Ah yes – cultural consultants. What’s that?
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Zea_Mays
Italia
Local time: 22:20
inglés al alemán
+ ...
There's a tofu firm in Germany called Taifun Tofu that sells a product under the name Feto - which in Italian means 'foetus'...
[Bearbeitet am 2026-10-18 18:39 GMT]
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Zea_Mays wrote:
There's a tofu firm in Germany called Taifun Tofu that sells a product under the name Feto - which in Italian means 'foetus'...
I consulted ChatGPT about this:
A client in Germany is marketing a food product under the brand name "Feto". Are there any European languages in which that brand name might be incongruous or inappropriate? What about non-European languages? In each case please briefly describe the problem, and suggest possible alternatives.
ChatGPT identified the Italian problem, and also that the same applies in Spanish and Portuguese, adding that:
Spanish also has the derogatory use meaning an ugly person.
It further pointed out that:
FETÖ is the Turkish government's acronym for the organisation associated with Fethullah Gülen, which the Turkish state designates a terrorist organisation. The Turkish spelling uses Ö, but the acronym is often rendered as FETO in English-language material. Consequently, a brand written in capitals could evoke a highly contentious political subject in Turkey.
ChatGPT found no equivalent problem in Japanese or Mandarin Chinese.
On further prompting, it identified the product in question, describing it as "tofu fermented with vegan yoghurt cultures, with a slightly sour taste", and commenting:
That doesn't make the name linguistically safe, of course. It does suggest that the name may be intended to evoke feta — the familiar cheese — rather than foetus. For a tofu product, that would be a clever piece of positioning: a plant-based alternative with some of the flavour characteristics of cheese.
ChatGPT concludes:
Feto for fermented tofu is a rather good name if the intended allusion is to feta. It's just unfortunate that Spanish, Italian and Portuguese have got there first with a different meaning.
I haven't found convincing evidence of a separate, widely recognised obscene or insulting meaning of feto in another major language that merits being presented as an established clash. I'd rather leave that as an uncertainty than invent one.
There's quite a lot more, which I won't post unless anybody asks me too.
However, I think this answers the question posed by this poll.
[Edited at 2026-10-19 04:43 GMT]
| | | | Zea_Mays
Italia
Local time: 22:20
inglés al alemán
+ ...
| it's a question of trust | 12:09 |
Philip Lees wrote:
Zea_Mays wrote:
There's a tofu firm in Germany called Taifun Tofu that sells a product under the name Feto - which in Italian means 'foetus'...
I consulted ChatGPT about this:
A client in Germany is marketing a food product under the brand name "Feto". Are there any European languages in which that brand name might be incongruous or inappropriate? What about non-European languages? In each case please briefly describe the problem, and suggest possible alternatives.
ChatGPT identified the Italian problem, and also that the same applies in Spanish and Portuguese, adding that:
Spanish also has the derogatory use meaning an ugly person.
It further pointed out that:
FETÖ is the Turkish government's acronym for the organisation associated with Fethullah Gülen, which the Turkish state designates a terrorist organisation. The Turkish spelling uses Ö, but the acronym is often rendered as FETO in English-language material. Consequently, a brand written in capitals could evoke a highly contentious political subject in Turkey.
ChatGPT found no equivalent problem in Japanese or Mandarin Chinese.
On further prompting, it identified the product in question, describing it as "tofu fermented with vegan yoghurt cultures, with a slightly sour taste", and commenting:
That doesn't make the name linguistically safe, of course. It does suggest that the name may be intended to evoke feta — the familiar cheese — rather than foetus. For a tofu product, that would be a clever piece of positioning: a plant-based alternative with some of the flavour characteristics of cheese.
ChatGPT concludes:
Feto for fermented tofu is a rather good name if the intended allusion is to feta. It's just unfortunate that Spanish, Italian and Portuguese have got there first with a different meaning.
I haven't found convincing evidence of a separate, widely recognised obscene or insulting meaning of feto in another major language that merits being presented as an established clash. I'd rather leave that as an uncertainty than invent one.
There's quite a lot more, which I won't post unless anybody asks me too.
However, I think this answers the question posed by this poll. [Edited at 2026-10-19 04:43 GMT]
Well, if you don't speak all these languages yourself, you can only trust the bot, while a serious company will work with local marketing and advertising pros in Japan, Turkey etc. in order to really be on the safe side.
What makes you that confident all those statements are correct? Are you able to verify them?
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