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.
@Gargron I've read machine translated versions of Beowulf, which I've read in various translations dozens of times. It's my favorite story of all time. And Old English, like Old Norse is a very descriptive language with hidden meaning behind it. And these machines loose those linquistic nuances. You can tell when a medieval text is machine translated...because they're not all that exciting. And Beowulf is exciting!
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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 The problem is that the pieces of shit peddling LLMs have convinced the political class that it's a race to technological supremacy and that any nation that bans them will be left behind. When in reality they're more like opium.
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@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."@gdinwiddie I quoted this a number of times over the past few decades
(I remembered it as "the spirit is strong", BTW) @virgilpierce @Gargron -
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 Some titles are perfectly constructed pearls of wisdom and insight. LLMs wouldn't have a clue.
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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.
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Also, LLMs are making machine translations worse by adding hallucinated content into the translations:
https://www.404media.co/ai-translations-are-adding-hallucinations-to-wikipedia-articles/
@Wally I mostly use machine translations when trying to read 16th century Danish. This is kind of a niche language variant to be reading so I don't expect them to be very good at it and that's fine, I'm just trying to get the gist usually.
Up to early 2025, Google Translate(*) was really useful for this. It would translate it more or less as if it was modern Danish, and every time it came across a word it didn't know(**), it would leave it untranslated. I could then either figure it out myself (from context, or prior experience, or "oh yeah uu = w" or whatever), or look it up in a contemporary dictionary, or decide it didn't matter for my purposes.
Then around April 2025 I started noticing it was translating *all* the words, and the resulting sentences sounded really clean and smooth. It's just they were sometimes wrong. Because now when it didn't know a word, it was putting in whatever English word it thought would be most statistically probable in the context. (At the same time, Highly Coincidentally, longer translations now made it prone to breaking down completely into LLM-gibberish.)
So since then I haven't been able to trust *any* part of its translations that I can't verify with my own knowledge of the language.
(*) I've tried various other products including open source ones, just haven't found anything as competent for my purposes.
(**) I'm using 'know' and the like as shorthand only, I know it doesn't know anything.
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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.
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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 perhaps, but my friend who is a translator (translates from Spanish to her native French in Mexico) can't find any translation jobs any more, other than cleaning up LLM translations.
As someone said, the market can be irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
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@Gargron Some titles are perfectly constructed pearls of wisdom and insight. LLMs wouldn't have a clue.
Stanislaw Lem
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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 all your base are belong to us, man...
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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 @aj I literally just bought a new translation of the Odyssey. My third, I think? But yeah, as an American English speaker I mostly have encountered this in other nerdy pursuits. Specifically, anime and manga. Years of online debate over translations, how and when to do cultural translation, the merits of transliteration, etc.
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Stanislaw Lem
@n_dimension Cannot confirm @Gargron
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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 Can confirm. Bad subtitles are almost worse than no subtitles to me, at least if I understand anything of the original language, because now I need to unpack the bad-english into something vaguely coherent. And if the meaning is too far off from the audio, it's like the mental version of running face first into the signpost marking two diverging forks as the reading and listening side try to reconcile a common meaning... Though sometimes they can get so terrible it ends up being "workable", but that's usually reserved for very specific instances. A trashy VN with an equally-trash translation? Makes perfect sense. A VN that tries to be even remotely serious about anything? Nope.
"Bad translations" generally still have their place, but more as a quick-n-dirty "get the gist of it" stuff that's okay with the end result being equivalent to "the reading comprehension of a 5 year old with an unusually large vocabulary".
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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.
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@gdinwiddie I quoted this a number of times over the past few decades
(I remembered it as "the spirit is strong", BTW) @virgilpierce @Gargron@Szescstopni The sentence I referenced is a bible verse.
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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 English, the angel and demon of Russian literature is Constance Garnett, who translated much of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky.
Angel, cuz she was one of the earliest sources of English translation.
Demon, cuz she manages to make Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky sound like the same writer.
Nabokov's Pushkin translation is an exercise in erudition. Half of every page is his translated quatrain. The other half, sometimes even more, is his footnotes about his choices & alternates.
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@Szescstopni The sentence I referenced is a bible verse.
@gdinwiddie Yes, and there a few different translations into Polish
"duch wprawdzie pełen chęci, ale ciało — słabe."
"duch wprawdzie ochoczy, ale ciało - słabe."
I wrote ho I remembered it for the record. And the vodka was strong, not good. Translations are a fascinating rabbit hole.
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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 When they say LLMs can replace artists what they mean is, "We have enough art now. The sum total of art we have is sufficient. Remixing and blending the corpus of art will be good enough forever. If not we can just tap some humans afflicted with the artist disease to generate some more, and it will be cheaper! They'll do it for free! Fools."
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@Gargron LLMs are not exclusively a product of large corporations or just marketing. Much of the research and development also takes place in open source and academic communities. The codes for these LLMs are public and can be audited or run locally. Furthermore, I argue that serious ethical reflection is necessary, but prohibition is not the way forward.
@df @Gargron Academics may study LLMs out in the open, but I don't think academia has been able to produce LLMs whose outputs are sufficiently marketable compared to the current commercially available ones. Because the first "L" ("large") is - in our current, limited understanding - crucial for the verisimilitude of the synthetic text, and only corporations (and governments, but they mostly haven't gotten to this yet) have the scale to get large enough for that so far.
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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
Hello
How are you?
