Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs.
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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 Douglas Hofstadter's 2018 assessment of the state of machine translation holds up remarkably well (he agreed with you):
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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
For many years, YouTube has been filled with tragic machine-translated captions, even before the new AI trend of the past few years. Not only machine translated ones, but also machine generated ones converted from spoken words.The problem with any machine translations or generated captions is that people aren't proofreading them. Viewers get garbage and the machines didn't get proper feedback.
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@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've translated two commercial games in my native language (French), and I've grown to appreciate games that have French translations made by actual humans (especially those with dialogues), because there's always a bunch of stuff that any machine translation algorithm is never going to pick up and, when done right, really makes it worth playing
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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 This.
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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."I've heard that one in German with some equivalent of "but the steak is not quite done".
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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@mastodon.social I think it's actually perfectly fine to just accept they fill their niche of roughly guessing what something means despite the fact modern translation models work pretty much the same as actual large language models? People trying to gotcha over this are usually not acting in good faith anyway (or dangerously reducing/simplifying things)
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@Gargron I think anglophones experience start difference between good and bad translations more often through video games
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All your bases are belong to Us
@gabboman@gabboman.xyz @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place @Gargron@mastodon.social tbf that's not translation, that's japanese speakers writing english
And IMO broken english in an old videogame is so much better than soulless LLM translation. Like yeah, it may be jibberish, but it's a part of the charm -
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 Yes, the German version of Lord of the Rings has different translators. When I tried reading it as a kid, I felt so lost. It was boring as hell.
Decades later I heard that the first translation is considered a bad one.
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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.
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.
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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 was read the Rig Veda, machine translated from Sanskrit to English. It was great for understanding the words that were used. And after I read a human translation I understood the text, in as far as one can understand a religious text
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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 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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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.
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.
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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.
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. -
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 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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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 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.
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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 Just before LLMs burst onto the scene, not long after my Creative Writing MA, a friend's partner told me about them and how they could, "write a novel as well a human." I think he expected me to be shocked or horrified by this, but as a student of literature and writing, I was far more astonished that apparently someone had come up with a way to determine the final analysis of a text! A Computer Science analogy might be someone telling you they'd found a solution to the Halting Problem
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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.
