October 18, 2023

By Stavroula Sokoli

I was recently invited to participate in the **2nd Conference of Translation & Interpreting Professionals** organized by the Panhellenic Association of Translators et al and talk about GenAI in audiovisual translation. As I always do before I start any presentation, publication or teaching material, I look at the terms. Getting them right in Greek is challenging, as almost all my readings are (regretfully) not in Greek.

I decided to write this post, instead of jotting stuff down on paper, both for my own reference and just in case anyone was interested. So, let’s get started.

AI has long been established in Greek as ΤΝ, Τεχνητή Νοημοσύνη.

As for GenAI, There are three terms that I found in the Greek context: Γενετική (also Γεννητική 🙄) ΤΝ, Παραγωγική ΤΝ, Δημιουργική ΤΝ.

I started by looking at IATE, and found Γενετική and Δημιουργική.

In Wikipedia there is no Greek page for Gen AI. Also looked at the more generic “Artificial Intelligence” entry in Greek, but there is no mention of generative there.

Looked at how Greek scientists use it. Guess what: they don’t publish in Greek (can’t throw stones myself). Even the research groups’ web pages are in English, e.g. the one from Patras University. See here for another example of publications only in English.

Google scholar turned back only 4 cases of Δημιουργική ΤΝ and Γενετική ΤΝ and no results for Παραγωγική ΤΝ.

A Google search brings 3,100 results for Δημιουργική ΤΝ, the first results being from general newspaper articles. Παραγωγική ΤΝ brings 3,800, some of them from European Parliament websites.

The most popular term is Γενετική ΤΝ, with 11,000

My personal take?

I dislike Δημιουργική because it’s the equivalent of “creative” - and we don’t want that, for ideological reasons (let’s try to keep the use of “creative” for humans 😉).

Γενετική is associated with genes and biology. Of course there is Γενετική Σημασιολογία, so the jury is not out on this.

Παραγωγικός and παράγω are associated with numbers and algorithms, which is what we want here. So, for the moment, I have decided to go with Παραγωγική Τεχνητή Νοημοσύνη.