The making of our Thanksgiving video was a journey that reminded us of the unique value human creativity brings to our work.

In a world where AI tools are rapidly evolving, we see AI not as competition but as an opportunity to reflect on the qualities that set us apart.

Our process—rooted in collaboration, thoughtfulness, and emotional nuance—is a testament to the irreplaceable role of the human touch in crafting meaningful connections.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, we decided to create a heartfelt greeting video to thank everyone—our clients, coworkers, and friends. Through our combined team efforts, we were able to make a video that sets us apart from AI. Here’s our process on how we made this year’s video special.

We gathered photos of our team members in action—focused, collaborating, and working wisely. These images were the perfect way to showcase the dedication and effort we put into every project. Each picture highlighted a different aspect of our work, whether in the office, in meetings, or working remotely.

We also gathered photos of our team celebrating Thanksgiving together. Whether we were sharing a toast, giving thanks, or simply enjoying each other’s company. These images added a joyful, festival touch to the video. It was important for us to show not only our professional side but also the warmth we share as a team.

To step it up a notch, we reached out to Layla and asked her to write a poem that would capture the team, dedication, and the spirit of Thanksgiving. Layla’s words were both thoughtful and inspiring. The poem beautifully expressed our gratitude and teamwork.

In praise of work partners

Integrity, merit, jubilation
Honorably, you display

Collaborative endeavors and dynamic talents
Significant affiliation creates

Vigorous diligence and wise resolutions
Remarkable admiration cultivates

Our heartfelt gratitude we proclaim to you
A bountiful Thanksgiving we wish for you

We carefully selected the best visuals to match each part of the poem, ensuring the transitions felt seamless and natural. We also added more Thanksgiving elements to make the video warmer and more festive.  We show Layla’s poem in its entirety at the end, but have stanzas of her poem alternate with our wishes and pictures of our staff. The result is a very interesting video that will make the viewer feel the warm greetings from Monterey Language Services while making sure that our thanks are conveyed.

One important thing we did in this video was feature our clients. It’s important to show that we’re all more than just a faceless company, but a team of people who are all working toward a common goal. It helps to show harmony, joy, and peace. This is something that we did last year as well, and something that we will continue to do each year.

We made sure that the transitions were consistent across the entire video and had a method where we would have the text fly in, and then when the next slide had pictures, we’d do a door opening effect. The door opening effect was used for all the pictures, but for text-to-text transitions, we had a slide effect. This was all very intentionally engineered to make a very smooth and comforting feel for the viewer as they watched the video.

From start to finish, we made sure every element of the video reflected the gratitude we feel for our clients, coworkers, and friends. It’s not just about the work we do; it’s about the connections we build and the community we’re part of.

Once completed, we were proud to share the final product—a video that not only conveyed our thanks but also celebrated teamwork, dedication, and joy. It was a reminder that the work we do is about more than just business; it’s about the people we collaborate with, and the relationships we build along the way. It has truly been a joy to work with all our clients and we look forward to our continued collaboration!

When people ask us if Chat GPT or AI is a threat to us, we will proudly answer no. We take a higher road that involves beauty, nuances, and uniqueness that only humans work together as a team can create!  AI produced work is plain and predictable. In our opinion, AI in fact has a long way to go in the language industry!

The debate over the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) vs. human capabilities is more relevant than ever. While it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing them as rivals, the real question is how the two can work together to be more effective. A recent conversation inside Monterey Language Service highlighted this future trend, revealing the crucial role that human expertise plays in AI development.

Humans can make AI better

In copy editing, AI can analyze text for grammatical errors, and even adjust tone and style based on the context. However, as Gary pointed out, AI may handle at best 80-90% of the editing process, but the last step often requires a human touch: flexible, context-aware, and capable of grasping nuances that AI might overlook.

Mei-Ling, on the other hand, argued that the focus should be not on the limitations of AI copy editing but on celebrating its rapid development and the role humans can play in enhancing AI capabilities.

The Path Forward: Enhancing AI with Human Expertise

Mei-Ling emphasized the idea that humans can make AI even better by providing it with high-quality training data. This is an important insight: the future of AI doesn’t lie solely in its inherent capabilities but in its integration with humans.

While refining AI’s editing capabilities, we need to provide it with a variety of professional materials to cut its teeth on. There are several ways that humans can do this, and it all begins with giving AI high quality writing to train on.

But what specific steps should be taken to move forward? There are many things we can do including, but not limited to the following:

• Clearly sharing context information with AI concerning the relevant conversation or the audience
• Exposing AI to detailed examples of human conversation, including informal language, idioms, and regional dialects
• Training AI to recognize and respond to emotional cues
• Sharing cultural nuances and social norms
• Guiding AI to better understand references and humor
• To model turn-taking and back-and-forth dialogue to AI
• Helping AI understand the tone, rhythm and flow of human conversation
• Feeding high quality content to AI
• Providing feedback on how the AI’s responses come across

By combining these approaches, professional linguists can play a vital role in shaping AI. More than ever, we as human translators and interpreters have a lot of work to do, particularly in connection with individual creativity and uniqueness.

Our Previous Blogs about AI

Monterey Language Services has constantly kept an eye on AI development. Our blog series since August of 2023 has been aimed at showing how the synergy of human creativity can elevate AI performance.

Check out our previous blogs about AI:

Professional Copyediting after Content Creation: Staying ahead of the AI curve

Blue and White Porcelain: The Joy of Translation from Behind the Scenes

A Love Letter to Chinese Culture — Blue and White Porcelain Lyrics

Advice to Future Interpreters

Interpreters and Music: Translation Accuracy

Interpreters and Voices: On Human Aura

Interpreters and Voices: On Human Recording

AI Performing Music: On Human Individuality

Diversity and Richness: Interpreters and Music

Thoughts about AI: Interpreters and Music

AI and Translation

These blogs discuss AI’s capabilities, how we have worked with it and what our expectations are.

“AI is able to follow patterns to come up with solutions that others may have thought of and implemented before, but without managing to achieve such originality on their own. Is it possible for AI to progress towards greater individuality and uniqueness?” ( AI Performing Music: On Human Individuality)

“AI is capable, but then can AI interpret our tones, our feelings, our energy, our life, our passion, our emotions, and our sense of mission that professional interpreters have shared?” ( Thoughts about AI: Interpreters and Music)

 Conclusion

Rather than debating whether humans or AI did better in copy editing, the blog is intended to celebrate the collaborative efforts that can make AI development and human creativity progress together. Ultimately, it’s essential to value partnership over competition. The future of copy editing will depend on our ability to combine human expertise with artificial intelligence to create something truly remarkable.

Though these two piano short clips are not played perfectly or professionally, we hope you can still feel our most sincere wishes being conveyed to you. There’s a certain rawness and unpolished sound from the music that goes straight to the deepest of our emotions. We don’t have to be a professional musician to tell a story or convey emotion, and that’s exactly what human touch or human aura is all about, and that’s what we would like to share for this year!

Happy New Year to everyone from Monterey Language Services! We wish you good health, peace, and success in the coming year! We have also prepared a holiday playlist for you to enjoy.

Please join us wholeheartedly in greeting the year 2024! Here’s to a year of aura and joy. Have a wonderful holiday season!

First music: played by Mei-Ling, our director of translation
Second music: played by Mei-Ling’s piano teacher Dian

This opinion has only been further enforced in the light of the current pandemic. With social distancing being encouraged, many businesses and individuals are moving away from face-to-face business and moving to the safety of digital solutions. With many people preferring in-person interpretation, and less interpreters willing to ignore safety conventions to fulfill these requests, there are some who would prefer to try machine translation.

In this day and age, there are sophisticated machine translation engines that can even almost do simultaneous interpretation. If the subject is within a specific, technical subject, the accuracy of the outputted translation goes up as well. Many would point to this as being the time for machine translation to rise in popularity and use.

Even so, businesses still tend to prefer using interpreters when they can. There is, and will most likely never be a true replacement to a human interpreter. In fact, interpreters were already still able to work remotely even before the pandemic. With Zoom and over-the-phone interpretation, interpreters are still able to work without too much of a change to the experience.

Of course, there are still some difficulties and annoyances with remote interpretation, but it is still the most reliable and preferred method for interpretation. The same applies for translation. Most translation has been done remotely, and is still preferred over machine translation for the same reason businesses prefer human interpreters. Though machine translation is a powerful tool, it is still not reliable or trusted enough to fully replace the human touch. During this pandemic, the work of translators and interpreters may be affected, but it is not because of a rise in machine translation.