Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
The Swiss government’s translators are now using artificial intelligence to translate official documents – we look at the pros and cons.
Monday’s briefing also includes the challenges of selling vegan cheese in dairy-loving Switzerland, and the death of the oldest Swiss at a very respectable 111 (known as a Nelson in cricket)…
In the news: Today’s news includes a Swiss-hosted peace summit for Ukraine, the agenda for the spring session of parliament, and the price watchdog’s annual report.
- Ukraine is hoping for a peace summit organised by Switzerland as early as this spring. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says a peace plan is to be drawn up with Ukraine’s partners, which will then be presented to Russia. On Friday Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis announced at the UN headquarters in New York that Switzerland intended to organise a high-level peace conference by the summer.
- The boards of directors of Swiss companies often struggle with the topic of sustainability and the implementation of corresponding targets, according to a study. More than four out of five board members recognise the growing importance of sustainability, but only half of the companies have set sustainability targets that they measure against.
- Expansion of the railway infrastructure, revision of the CO2 Act, aid in Ukraine and a ban on tobacco advertising: Swiss parliamentarians are discussing weighty bills in the spring session, which starts today.
- Price watchdog Stefan Meierhans once again received more messages from citizens last year. He said this was an expression of growing concern and discontent among the population about the rising cost of living. Around one message in five related to energy prices.
- Born before the Titanic sank, Switzerland’s oldest person has died at the age of 111. She had lived for the last 20 years in a home for the elderly in Orvin in canton Bern.
The Swiss government’s translators, who translated almost 300,000 pages in 2022, are now using artificial intelligence (AI) as an additional tool. But it has its limits.
Translation is a demanding job that requires accuracy, speed and a human understanding of texts. The neural machine translation tool DeepL Pro is now powerful enough for the government’s translators to use it as an additional aid, Swiss public radio RTS, reported. We at SWI swissinfo.ch also use DeepL for certain tasks, such as translating our news reports (which are, of course, checked by a human).
However, its progress can hide its shortcomings, reckons Jonathan Thuillard, deputy head of translation at the Swiss parliament. “At first glance, the text translated by DeepL may appear to be of good quality. But when you take a closer look, you realise it’s not quite what the original text says. Perhaps implicit links have been made. There may also be things that don’t need to be explained in German but should be in French so that French-speakers understand what’s going on.”
In addition, DeepL remains a generalist tool that doesn’t necessarily have all the specialised vocabulary, particularly when it comes to legal terms. It can save translators time, but always at the expense of quality.
All of DeepL’s potential for error makes the work of professional translators indispensable, RTS said. The texts of parliamentary committees and the Federal Assembly are of particular legal importance. Cantonal authorities, the general public and interested parties rely on these translations, which must be faithful to the original and well written.
Another weakness of DeepL is its inability to translate Romansh, one of Switzerland’s four national languages. Other AI-based translation tools exist that that try to translate Romansh (an official language in trilingual canton Graubünden), but the problem is a lack of texts in Romansh on which the AI can “train”.
For Monika Röthlisberger, head of the competence centre for language technologies, AI doesn’t represent a threat to the work of the government’s 400-plus translators. On the contrary, it will help their profession evolve, she told RTS. And these automatic translation tools could even be a way of relieving translators of certain tedious tasks. “On the other hand, texts that require a lot of expertise will always need a real translator,” she said.
Confidentiality is another issue to be taken into account. When you use DeepL Pro, the data briefly travel on servers abroad. So it’s out of the question to slip in a confidential report on Credit Suisse, for example.
If you’re interested in how politicians in Switzerland, which, as mentioned, has four national languages (German, French, Italian and Romansh), can understand each other when they meet in parliament, you’ll enjoy this article in which I spoke to one of parliament’s highly skilled interpreters.
Making vegan cheese is one thing, selling it in dairy-loving Switzerland is another. The founders of a successful vegan company explain how expanding was not without challenges.
Vegan cheese is still a niche product in Switzerland. Alice Fauconnet and Freddy Hunziker, founders of New Roots, estimate that it accounts for around 0.5% of the Swiss cheese market.
One obstacle in expanding market share is that New Roots’ branding revolves around animal rights, which resonates little with the Swiss, who consume an average of 293 kilos of milk and dairy products such as cheese, yoghurt and butter a year. “People believe that cows naturally make milk from grass for humans. They find the environmental argument to be less judgmental than animal rights,” Fauconnet says.
Despite pressure from investors to drop vegan from the label and opt for plant-based instead, the company is sticking to its vision of putting animals front and foremost of the brand identity.
Read the full story – and how the biggest pushback has come from the Swiss milk lobby – and watch the accompanying video of the challenge of bringing vegan cheese to Switzerland.
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