Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs.
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imagine for a moment, the billionaires have been beheaded and the yachts sunk into the sea. the value in the output of workers 100% reinvested into local communities. all of it. none for colonial masters far away. the 20 hour work weeks and all human workers hands full of the satisfaction their efforts are meaningful... no more busy work for shareholders to skim value out of. only meaningful work. custom artisanal everything. housewares repaired by local handicrafters. clothes sewn and tailored to each body. homes and townhomes and communal living spaces built and maintained by cooperative owners. neighboring towns and regions and nations translating with loving care between the communities of meaning... interconnected with care.
And that lasts 1-2 generations before new people who don't understand the problems that lead their parents to create the paradise chafe under their constraints and begin changing the system to something its originators wouldn't like, this creating conflict, diversity of thought, and continuing the cycle of history.
See: reality.
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@cwdolunt I do not appreciate being thrown quotes at. If you want to say something say it directly, in your words.
That said, I was not suggesting that corporations have divine power. I was saying that expecting something that happened 50 years ago (banning of asbestos) to happen today is ignoring the change of the world in the meantime.
Back then, you could fight asbestos. Now you need to fight capitalism.
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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
But I'm sure we'll be seeing books written by LLMs translated to all the different languages - by LLMs.Oh, and then you won't even have to read the LLM translated LLM written book, because you can just ask an LLM to summarize it for you.
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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 sometimes translate text (bilingual German-English). And I have edited a machine-translated book, and let me tell you it does NOT save time.
I basically had to go back and rewrite almost every sentence. It was so bad the publisher actually put me on the cover as translator.
DeepL is good for short non-fiction stuff, and even that needs to be polished if you want to use it for anything serious.
Do not rely on anything AI. Never.
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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.
I'm seeing more and more "translations" that are just run through machines (DeepL etc.). Even reading the descriptions for those books (some of which are favorite comfort books) in "German" makes me shudder.
It's not German. It's basically English dressed up as German.
Those "translations" are a rip-off for everyone involved except the agencies doing the "translations".
I've refused to read translations for years, but they are now becoming completely unreadable.
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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 Much like lead, it makes people dumber. Which might be what certain people want.
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@ErikUden @Gargron I work for Swiss Broadcast Company. Our devs did a wonderfull job in this regard. I get autotranslated subtitles that are amazingly good. It ain't literature but very good. It's a two tier system that joins the captions, then translation and then reconstructing the captions. Translation is done by Claude. Langs are not that big of a challange (DE FR IT EN). Only Rumantsch is a challange. Claude 3.5(!) Is pretty darn good though. Claude 4+ not so much
@decurtins @ErikUden @Gargron
The things is that only people who speak the translated language sufficiently well, can assess the validity of the translation. So in specialist's hands the machine translation has some value. Still a nogo for literature.
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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 Obviously AI will replace all skills except the one I have. The other ones are all simple, whereas the one I am competent in is very complex!
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@Sonikku do you by any chance still have those discs? i would love to rip them and extract that subtitle track for purposes of amusing my friends
@AVincentInSpace not for decades now I’m afraid
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Morris Marina wasn't completely uncommon in the Netherlands - although only a handful made it over there and interestingly it seems nearly all have been preserved as oldtimers!
But the old lady in NL would more likely ride her bicycle to church, probably at much less than 30 km/h and quite likely so would all the rest of the congregation - the translator would have definitely needed to find another concept to match this..
I got a DIY maintenance manual for my car which is in German (there isn't an equivalent one of same quality in English) and I definitely won't wholly trust an LLM to translate that (instead I print the relevant pages, go through it by hand and make notes of points that don't immediately come to mind as my German is only as good as a teenager)
@vfrmedia @Gargron
To my shame, my German is just about good enough to get drunk."Zwei bier, bitte."
In fact, I know just about enough of most European languages to get drunk anywhere in Europe.
This was a vitally important skill when I spent a month Inter-Railing in my youth, but not so much nowadays, when I'm 18 years sober. -
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