Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs.
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@Gargron I worked with subtitle translations for years... I need to comment on this!
The main issue people working with machine translated subtitles is that people take models for translating things in a single modal – text – and applying to a multimodal media – video. Of course the results are horrible!
There are research on improving that, sure, I did some, even, but even we are FAAAR from getting them any good. Translating "The nurse aided the doctor take care of the patient." to many languages require guessing the gender of three people! LLMs will often default to male, female and male, due to bias.
But, the sad thing we have to admit: many works of art are so unpopular the only translations people will have are machine ones, from weird anime like Sazae-san, to Mastodon toots.
@Gargron By the way, this is a website of mine that I stopped working on for some reasons, but I kept it only so it can show many examples of errors that I hope that are from humans: https://erros-da-cr.neocities.org/en/
An example of a mistake caused for ignored context: https://erros-da-cr.neocities.org/oneroom-s2/#VIM95W
The original line is "Aw, it went out.", the translator translated it as "Aw, it exited." instead of "Aw, it the fire extinguished". The error immediately below it is due to a false-cognate: the translator translated "middle school" to "ensino médio" which, translated literally means "middle education", but actually means "high school".
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@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.
I'm in the US and was not aware of this option on Netflix, but just used it to add French and Spanish to my languages, even though I was already able to watch films with these audio and subtitle settings.
In contrast, on Amazon Prime I'm only able to see English subtitle options for non-English films. I was hoping to watch Amelie in French with French subtitles on for learning purposes, but only English subtitles are offered.
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i do appreciate automatic subtitles extremely for hitting all my humor-chords. may they never evolve.
that being said:
i am lucky and able to read in several languages and read a lot of our bookclub books in original language. i can't count how many times i liked books that many of the others couldn't even finish their translated ones (assumedly) because the language was so poor. (and then we have those who listen to books and it totally depends on the person who was recorded.i had a small introduction into translation during which we translated poems, prose and other texts, and the translations techniques and challenges varied so so much.
it is an art, and i value translators so so much. (considering current developments i'm still very glad i chose another career)
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From what I've observed, people who claim that LLMs can replace artists don't understand art, people who claim that they can replace musicians don't understand music, people who claim that they can replace writers don't understand literature, and people who claim they can replace translators don't rely on translations. If I had a button that would erase LLMs from the world but it would take machine translations away (which is a false dichotomy anyway), I would absolutely still press it.
My experience has been that LLM translations are almost good enough to verify that a message is a scam.
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From what I've observed, people who claim that LLMs can replace artists don't understand art, people who claim that they can replace musicians don't understand music, people who claim that they can replace writers don't understand literature, and people who claim they can replace translators don't rely on translations. If I had a button that would erase LLMs from the world but it would take machine translations away (which is a false dichotomy anyway), I would absolutely still press it.
@Gargron - Re music, when I asked my spouse today what he'd add to my list of "things humans can do that AI bots can't" (https://me.dm/@funcrunch/116206885885065034), he said live audio mixing. (He's a professional audio engineer.)
ETA: I gave the same response as to when he proposed "Empathy": AI bots *pretend* they can do this, and are convincing at it. That's the problem.
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@Gargron It is a technology that humanity has been seeking for a long time. At least since the 1950s, with Turing and his colleagues.
@df No, this is marketing. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic &co want you to believe that what they're doing is artificial intelligence. My professional opinion is that LLMs are a dead end technology to creating actual intelligence. And if any of those companies did create actual intelligence for the purposes they pursue, it would be slavery, for which I cannot advocate.
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Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.
@Gargron would you know if you've seen a good outcome of an LLM? You'd somehow be able to identify when the LLM got it right?
I assure you you've experienced good LLM output and don't even know it. Because that's what good LLM output looks like. Indistinguishable from human output.
Your examples are perhaps false equivalencies. Take asbestos. We didn't abolish insulation. We developed better, safer insulation. We didn't stop dying food colors, we just developed safer dyes etc.
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@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.@cktodon I've seen a work of Terry Pratchett "translated" (by a human though) from British English to US English. To even have the idea this could be useful enrages me.
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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 haven't actually used French in almost 30 years, but still get annoyed watching movies where the subtitles are wrong. I have been known to pause, check a translation, curse at whoever did the captions for missing subtleties (in their subtitles), and the hit play again!
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@Gargron But it seems that LLMs are here to stay. This time, it doesn't seem to be just a passing fad. There is a lot of investment involved.
Just because a bunch of drug addicts dump all their money (and that from others) into drugs doesn't make them inevitable/good/useful...
️Latest example: NFTs
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From what I've observed, people who claim that LLMs can replace artists don't understand art, people who claim that they can replace musicians don't understand music, people who claim that they can replace writers don't understand literature, and people who claim they can replace translators don't rely on translations. If I had a button that would erase LLMs from the world but it would take machine translations away (which is a false dichotomy anyway), I would absolutely still press it.
@Gargron "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy4EfdnMZ5g
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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 Heck, even machine-generated captions are often bad, without the translation. To then translate that inaccurate text is bound to result in problems.
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Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.
@Gargron we were not doing them 5 years ago, shouldn't be that difficult, right? Not even the cell phone was so quickly introduced in our lives, it's a complete madness!
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From what I've observed, people who claim that LLMs can replace artists don't understand art, people who claim that they can replace musicians don't understand music, people who claim that they can replace writers don't understand literature, and people who claim they can replace translators don't rely on translations. If I had a button that would erase LLMs from the world but it would take machine translations away (which is a false dichotomy anyway), I would absolutely still press it.
@Gargron people who claim that llm can replace middle management DO understand them
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@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.
The German translations of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels by Andreas Brandhorst are quite good - but 50% of the jokes are intranslatable puns, and of the rest, he broke a lot because he didn't understand them.
I had to translate some joke around Hex back to understand it. Afterwards, I only read them like Terry had written them. -
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@Gargron Back in my pretentious high schooler days I read Dante's Comedy and, don't know where from, the version I found was one that was like... fully translated as poetry, like in the Italian* original, going as far as trying to replicate the rhyme structure
No computer's ever going to pull off anything even remotely that mad
@VileLasagna @Gargron oh that’s probably John Ciardi’s translation
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@VileLasagna @Gargron oh that’s probably John Ciardi’s translation
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Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.
Machine vs. Human translation of fiction is an excellent analogy. Good translation involves an understanding of complicated material in an intuitive and nuanced way, and conveying those subtleties cleverly using equally complex forms in the target language while retaining the beauty of the writing. It involves much higher level thought than what LLMs do.
Likewise software engineering is much more complex and involves higher level thinking than prompted LLM code generation.
