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.
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.
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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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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
And it's not just expressions and turns of phrase, which are unique not only to each language but easily to each region.It's words. There is often no exact match. Many words in one language are not a precise correspondence to those in another.
So an elegant turn of phrase in one becomes a wordy explanation in the other. Or a misinterpretation.
Only someone fluent in both languages can convey the true meaning accurately and eloquently.
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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.
Well said.
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@Shunra @cstross @Gargron
My go-to example is the Esperanto translation of Alice Through The Looking Glass published by Evertype, which has 5 different translations of "Jabberwocky", each of which is absolutely "correct" and each of which is totally different from each other. Even the names of the poem differ.
In each case one can see the decisions the translator made balancing meter, rhyme, meaning, implications & nuance of the text, based on what it meant to them; how can a computer do that? -
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 Many years ago, while on holiday in Amsterdam, I bought a Dutch translation of a book by one of my favourite authors, Terry Pratchett.
In it, there was an essay, in English, by Terry, about his struggles to find a translator for the book, which was only accomplished when he realised that it wasn't just a case of taking the text and replacing it with Dutch.
No, large sections would have to be entirely re-written by the translator, to use concepts that a Dutch audience would find familiar.
And not just in Dutch, but every language.
The example he gave was one character who was experiencing the feeling of being stuck in traffic on a busy road on a Sunday afternoon, and after miles of driving, finding that the cause of the tailback was a little old lady out for her weekly drive to church in her trusty old Morris Marina, never getting above 20 MPH becuase it felt too fast.
This is something that British people are well acquanted with, but the Dutch translator had to come up with a completely different way of explaining this, because it's not something particularly prevalant over there.
It's not just about translating the words, its translating the feelings, the emotions, to something readers in another place will understand.
And LLM's fail spectacularly at that. -
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 think anglophones experience start difference between good and bad translations more often through video games
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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 and then there's the question on how it's used
see firefox that generated new translations and threw awai human written ones -
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 As an LLM would say to a translator: "All your job are belong to us".
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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 to make matters worde, at least in the UK when you buy a DVD it only comes with English audio, English audio with descriptions, and maybe original audio, and just English subtitles, and English for the hard of hearing. That’s it. But in Spain, the same DVD, locked to the same region, carried the original audio, audio described English audio, Spanish dubbing, German dubbing, Italian dubbing… and all those languages in subtitles, plus some more.
So it is really difficult for them to be exposed to non-English content,
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@aeduna @Gargron Oh yes. Translating the story is one thing, but especially with Pratchett it’s only half the story.
Puns are horrible to translate, you either just skip them because they just don’t work, or you go to extremes to wring some kind of joke out of them.
There isn’t necessarily a right approach here. This particular Pratchett translation apparently skipped a lot, but I also remember a HHGTTG translation that took the “a joke at *any* cost” path and um.
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@Sonikku there is absolutely no way this is real
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this kind of bad translations /autosubtitles is the best comedy to my neurodivergent brain.
i speak several languages and always try to find out where it went wrong too, so it's educating too
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@Gargron I think anglophones experience start difference between good and bad translations more often through video games
All your bases are belong to Us
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@Gargron to make matters worde, at least in the UK when you buy a DVD it only comes with English audio, English audio with descriptions, and maybe original audio, and just English subtitles, and English for the hard of hearing. That’s it. But in Spain, the same DVD, locked to the same region, carried the original audio, audio described English audio, Spanish dubbing, German dubbing, Italian dubbing… and all those languages in subtitles, plus some more.
So it is really difficult for them to be exposed to non-English content,
@Gargron and even Netflix shows different audio options in Spain (around five languages audio, plus original English audio for an American or British TV series, and at least the same subtitles) or the UK (just English audio, maybe with audio descriptions).
You need to explicitly go to your user settings *on the website* to explicitly add languages you might be interested in. Then those audio and subtitle options appear for those titles that support them.
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there's a universe of this stuff out there
my favorite is from the 2008 beijing olympics, a restaurant translating its name for foreign visitors, and dutifully announcing what the translation service fed back to them
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