Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 29 – Even as 47 Russian and Chinese universities celebrated the creation of an Association of Joint Educational Organizations, an official of the Russian ministry overseeing higher education expressed concern that AI translations, which were supposed to integrate scholars from the two countries are having the opposite effect.
Vera Skorobogatova, who works on educational cooperation at the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education, said that all too often Chinese students at Russian universities are using AI translations rather than learning Russian as Moscow had hoped they would do (asia24.media/news/nikakikh-neudobnykh-voprosov-47-universitetov-dvukh-sverkhderzhav-sozdali-unikalnyy-alyans/).
They can read texts that have been translated by AI and they can even listen to lectures via headsets where AI-generated translations are provided, she says. Consequently, they see little need to learn Russian and thus are not being integrated with Russia as had been the case earlier. Indeed, now, “they prefer not to learn Russia.”
“This is a systemic failure,” Skorobogatova continued. “The technology that was supposed to be bridge instead has turned out to be a wall as a student with interpreter headphones may be physically present but intellectually remains thousands of kilometers away” in his or her home country.
Judging by reports of the meeting at which she spoke, the Russian official did not address what almost certainly is behind the decision of Chinese exchange students not to perfect their language: Russian is no longer a language in which cutting edge research and scholarship is published, and so Chinese students looking to the future are learning other languages instead.
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