Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs.
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Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.
Kille Bill -> 'Kill rekening' (Kill the invoice)
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@inanedirk @Gargron Microsoft uses machine translations on their pages extensively, and the results are a mess. They even OCR and translate the screenshots, so you end up with screenshots that have wrong text crammed over the English original, making them doubly useless.
@inanedirk @Gargron Oh, and not just pages, it seems that at least parts of Windows are machine-translated nowadays, because some texts make absolutely no sense and use extremely weird word combinations.
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@cstross @Gargron
Machine translations are more of a hindrance than a help, for translators. If you don't know both languages well, having an automated dictionary lookup could possibly be useful - but if you're a translator, and especially a translator of fiction, having a nuanceless draft will only take more time to figure out. And it will be irritating time, because reading mistranslations is a pain. Editing one's own drafts is hard enough!As to B: Editors rely on readers, reviews /...
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@Gargron I'm willing to guess that machine translation of prose may serve two uses: firstly, as an assist for human translators (by preparing a very rough first cut, which they then have to refine), and secondly, as an assist for human editors in figuring out which foreign-language-works to pay a human translator (with or without AI assistance) to work on (translation costs money: knowing where to spend it is important). But those are assistive roles, not human-replacing ones.
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@Gargron I'm willing to guess that machine translation of prose may serve two uses: firstly, as an assist for human translators (by preparing a very rough first cut, which they then have to refine), and secondly, as an assist for human editors in figuring out which foreign-language-works to pay a human translator (with or without AI assistance) to work on (translation costs money: knowing where to spend it is important). But those are assistive roles, not human-replacing ones.
@cstross @Gargron My (very not translator) impression is that human translators who have worked from rough machine translations, say that it’s harder than just translating the text.
Also, today I was in a work info session, where the talks were translated by some MS PoS thing, from Finnish to English. The results were horrendous, if hilarious. It might get better but I don’t really know why. Good simultaneous interpretation is kind of a human-level problem, really. Context matters!
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I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
@Gargron Many times when I land on an auto-translated site I have to change the language to english because I don't even understand what's supposed to mean.
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Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.
@Gargron Yeah, people who don't know anything about language or translation seem to think of translation as a perfect example of a "mechanical" process that should be automate-able.
*Maybe* for some kinds of technical writing (which still has its difficulties), but good translation of literature is probably one of the hardest things to replace humans for, right alongside writing good literature in the first place.
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Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.
@Gargron much of my work is as a legal translator (evidence, wiretaps, court filings, etc.)
The party that relies on machine translations or worse, AI translations, is the party that will lose the case. Any translator can pick holes in an AI translation big enough to cross through with a herd of elephants. Those "translations" lack nuance.
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I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
@Gargron Native speaker: I think you’re right. Though I have seen warnings recently about “new translation” editions on Amazon that are just LLM trash.
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I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
@Gargron @mastodon.social I absolutely agree.
On the other hand, although I'm a native spanish speaker, I've read a couple of books in english.
I think that US pleople don't even consider reading in any language but english. -
@Gargron or Google's auto translated crab, Voice or text is atrocious
@hashraydamon @Gargron I was thinking about asr too! Youtube has been using that since 2009 and it still sucks somehow!
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@cstross @Gargron I have a friend who worked for years as a translator (English to French) but in recent years he found that he was no longer being asked to translate but to "post-edit" machine translations. It was taking him just as long, paying him less, and destroying his soul.
He now works as a tour guide.
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Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.
@Gargron I minored in linguistics in college, and a lot of exciting work was being done at the time around developing syntax models of how languages worked (and different ways humans use syntax), in part to inform machine translation models. This was more than 25 years ago. No LLMs involved.
I have not kept up with current developments in machine translation but I strongly suspect that it's built on the foundation of those decades of work actually understanding how languages function, and what maps or doesn't map. Which is completely different than expecting generative AI to create a model. -
Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.
@Gargron Translation is real hard work.
It takes some real work to get all the nuances and some of the things you write in one language can take real effort not to sound utter BS in another.
Become even harder when you want to keep this through a longer document (literature as you said but not only)
LLM is a great solution though for a person that wants to get the work done and have "a product" in a language that they don't understand
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I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
@Gargron I've read translations of Haruki Murakami's novels in English and my native Danish - and I've found the latter *far* better. I can't judge the fidelity to the originals because I don't speak Japanese, but at least my reading experience with the Danish translations were a lot better - and I've probably read at least ten times as much English in my life as Danish.
I learned a while ago that the Danish translator of most (possibly all) Murakami's books has lived in Japan, knows Murakami personally, and talks to him about her translation work. And, well, the level of care put into those translations really shows.
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@Gargron plus doesn't everyone do the test of translate then translate back? They are garbage in a way that even a machine could recognize as garbage.
@virgilpierce @Gargron
There's an old joke from the 1960s about machine translation of the saying "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" from English to Russian and then back again.
The result was "the vodka is good but the meat is rotten." -
I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
@Gargron
languages are usually not 1:1, and translation is impossible to automate without butchering the original meaning.bad translation really sticks out when you understand both languages. even if it's serviceable enough to get the core meaning across, it might fail to capture the tone, the cultural references, and the full weight.
i have a lot of respect for people who create good subtitles that try to preserve the original intent, even when it sometimes feels impossible.
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Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.
on the plus side, machine translation illuminated me as to the involvement of the presbyterian church in the famous movie "Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West"
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@Gargron I'm willing to guess that machine translation of prose may serve two uses: firstly, as an assist for human translators (by preparing a very rough first cut, which they then have to refine), and secondly, as an assist for human editors in figuring out which foreign-language-works to pay a human translator (with or without AI assistance) to work on (translation costs money: knowing where to spend it is important). But those are assistive roles, not human-replacing ones.
I feel pretty dumb telling this to the master, but translating a literary work is much more than changing one word for another. Even it you keep all the meaning, it gets weird and doesn't flow; each language has its own rhythm and cadence. A good translator frequently has to completely rewrite a paragraph to keep the sense, the emotions and the flow of the story. Even worse, he needs to make it faithful to the original, which having intermediate versions can make harder.
I'm not a professional translator, but I have tried to translate some public domain stories, and found that automatic translation is a hindrance. I had to rewrite nearly all, looking always to the original version. It was too easy to drift far from it and get the text and the author absolutely distorted.
It is a work of art and love, not something a machine can do at all. Not even a part of it.
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I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
@Gargron In addition a lot of anglophone people speak only one language, so they've never been able to compare the translation of a book between two languages they speak.
