Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs.
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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.
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@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.
@Gargron ultimately LLMs like any other software is a tool. It's all about how a human uses them.
Lets take photoshop as an example. Humans generate vast amounts of garbage photoshopped images. Ever been to deviant art?
And yet the same tool is used by professionals all day every day to create stuff we like and enjoy.
The same applies to LLM use, and back to my first reply. What you lament is low quality output a human shared. Meanwhile the tool gets used masterfully to great effect elsewhere
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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.@wonka @Gargron I generally prefer to read things in their original language if I can. I've never read the Danish translations of Discworld (and I suspect the running gag about the Librarian's trigger word would fall completely flat in both Danish and German, for the same reason!).
But a couple of years ago I started reading Danish translations of literature in languages I don't speak (French, Arabic, Japanese, etc.) - I'd usually defaulted to English for no good reason. The Danish ones are sometimes better, sometimes worse - but in the case of Murakami it really wasn't even close.
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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 yes some people have stunted systems of ethics and values, what about it.
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@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.
@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.
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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 ultimately LLMs like any other software is a tool. It's all about how a human uses them.
Lets take photoshop as an example. Humans generate vast amounts of garbage photoshopped images. Ever been to deviant art?
And yet the same tool is used by professionals all day every day to create stuff we like and enjoy.
The same applies to LLM use, and back to my first reply. What you lament is low quality output a human shared. Meanwhile the tool gets used masterfully to great effect elsewhere
@Tekchip
maybe these toots are slop output? philosophically average, without comprehension of qualitative significance.there is no value in the average. it is only in the deviations that standards exist. and these toots... are valorizing mediocrity. sad.
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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?@HighlandLawyer @Shunra @cstross @Gargron i’ve always found the wealth of translations of ‘the little prince’ to be fascinating, and the way folks can trace back certain choices, showing that x translation was actually based off of y translation instead of the original french, &c.
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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.
Translation is a fine art, as word-for-word will get you a ROUGH idea (usually!) but once you get into idioms, or figures of speech, everything changes entirely, often making no sense at all.
Even outside of that, different languages or dialects have different words (or lack thereof!) "Buzzard" in Europe is a broad-winged soaring raptor; in the USA, it's slang for a vulture.
I'm on the spectrum and it took me a very long time to learn puns, figures of speech, and such. I've also watched people get confused by turns of phrase when they're ESL, or even from a different region.
It's not as common now, but I used to see artists who were non-English speakers have a warning "Do not write your letter and then push it through Google Translate to send to me in my native language. It's terrible."
Anyone who thinks AI can do translation is a liar or a fool.
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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 it is weird to think the utility of machine translations is in books and film and not, say, news articles, restaurant menus, weather reports, texts to a hotel, train schedules, etc.
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@Gargron ultimately LLMs like any other software is a tool. It's all about how a human uses them.
Lets take photoshop as an example. Humans generate vast amounts of garbage photoshopped images. Ever been to deviant art?
And yet the same tool is used by professionals all day every day to create stuff we like and enjoy.
The same applies to LLM use, and back to my first reply. What you lament is low quality output a human shared. Meanwhile the tool gets used masterfully to great effect elsewhere
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@Gargron while all your examples are 100% valid, I seriously question whether we would be able to manage to do that today. With the utter shambles most democracies are in currently, multi-national Corporations can run roughshod on environmental protection, worker safety, child protection and just about everything that past generations fought hard for.
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.
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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.
True story: I wanted to read the novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo some years back, so I went to the bookstore and they had two translations. The first had a serious-looking cover and the other had a trashy-looking one, so naturally I bought the former. Started to read it. It was garbage! So I went back and exchanged for the trashy-looking book. A wonderful translation!
Moral of the story: you can't judge a book by its cover.
Also, translation is art.
