I'm writing this in English.

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

I'm writing this in English.

Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.

This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.

@Gargron@mastodon.social argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.

For many of us, translation is first about access.

The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.

@Gargron@mastodon.social notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.

There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.

I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron@mastodon.social describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.

The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.

[krans@mastodon.me.uk]

@hongminhee Criticisms of Anglophonic hegemony are similar to (and inseparable from) criticisms of capitalism.

In many cases, systems people put in place to mitigate capitalism's harms inadvertently strengthen capitalism's grip (e.g. tax credits for low paid workers allow them to be paid even less).

Similarly, lowering the bar for communication in English, as you describe, makes it ever less likely that we'll ever start treating non English speakers as first class citizens.

@gargron

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

@krans@mastodon.me.uk The analogy is structurally interesting, but I think it breaks down at a crucial point.

With tax credits, the argument is that the subsidy lets employers off the hook—pressure that would otherwise force wages up gets absorbed by the state instead. The discomfort falls on capital, or at least that's the intent. But when you apply the same logic to language access, the discomfort doesn't fall on the Anglophone center. It falls on the people who were already excluded. The implicit suggestion becomes: non-English speakers should communicate less fluently, so that English speakers are eventually pressured into… what, exactly? Learning Korean? There's no mechanism there.

The deeper problem is that “lowering the bar for communication in English” is not the same thing as accepting English hegemony as permanent. I use these tools to participate in a conversation that would otherwise exclude me. That's not capitulation—it's the same logic as using a wheelchair ramp. You don't refuse the ramp because its existence lets architects keep building stairs.

The structural critique of hegemony is real and I share it. But it shouldn't cash out as advice to the marginalized to make themselves less legible. That's a cost I'm not willing to ask people to pay on behalf of a structural shift that may never come.

@Gargron@mastodon.social

[krans@mastodon.me.uk]

@hongminhee My employer is perfectly capable of affording to translate our product manuals into Korean professionally — I'm here in Korea right now supporting a *massive* customer.

Instead our official policy is that Korean users will be fed LLM slop that our tech writers won't even attempt to read and validate.

That's exclusion and condescension packaged as providing access.

@gargron

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

@krans@mastodon.me.uk That's a real and legitimate grievance, but it's a different argument from the one we were having.

Your employer using LLM translation to cut costs on documentation for a massive Korean customer (while having the resources to do it properly) is a decision made by someone with power, to save money, at the expense of Korean users. That's worth being angry about.

But I'm an individual trying to participate in a public conversation. I can't hire a personal interpreter every time I want to respond to a post. The choice I actually face is: use available tools, or stay silent. Those aren't the same situation, and the same tool can mean very different things depending on who's holding it and why.

If anything, your example reinforces the point. The problem isn't the tool, but it's who gets to decide when it's “good enough.”

[antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz]

@hongminhee @Gargron
I would like to add one point that I rarely see addressed: a translation is also a responsability, that the text provided is faithful to the original, possibly imperfect, but faithful.

If it is provided to you, at your request, them it's a contract between you and your provider. You might say that automatic translation is better than nothing.

But if it is imposed on you, as in subtitles, then you have no other choice but them and the responsability is on the provider. In this case, automatic translation will essentially not be admissible.

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

@antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz The distinction you're drawing is a useful one, and I largely agree with it. When translation is imposed on you with no alternative, the responsibility for its faithfulness lies with whoever imposed it.

But it makes me ask: which category does my situation fall into?

I'm writing this reply in English. Not because I chose English as my preferred language of expression, but because if I wrote it in Korean, it would either be ignored or filtered through whatever tool my interlocutor happens to have on hand—and any resulting misreading would be treated as my problem. So I write in English, carefully, to preempt that. Is that a voluntary choice? Formally, yes. Practically, it sits much closer to the “imposed” end of your spectrum than it might appear.

The contract model works cleanly when both parties have genuinely equivalent alternatives. When one party's only real options are “use this tool” or “don’t participate,” the contract framing starts to obscure more than it reveals.

@Gargron@mastodon.social

[antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz]

@hongminhee @Gargron on this network, I would find rude that you answer me in Korean as you would find rude that I answer you in French. But the software is connected with automatic translation system that may allow you to start some interaction, in a language or another, possibly falling out onto English. We both have this possibility, which allows us to share the responsability.
(And if you didn't speak a single word out of Korean, and I didn't speak a word out of French, we wouldn't have much choice then, but trust that system!)

[antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz]

@hongminhee @Gargron Imagine we start following each other. Then you will see the posts I send in French, and I will see yours in Korean, as I see many on German or Spanish (although I speak German but not Spanish). In any case, some freedom emerges.

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

@antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz I appreciate the spirit of what you're describing, and the fediverse's approach to translation is genuinely one of its nicer features.

I'd just gently push back on one assumption: that the automatic translation available to both of us is roughly equivalent. French–English and Korean–English are not the same problem for these systems. The linguistic distance is much greater, the training data has historically been thinner, and the results have reflected that gap for a long time. It's only fairly recently that Korean–English machine translation has become reliable enough to carry a real conversation without significant loss.

So when you write in French and I write in Korean, we're not quite sharing the responsibility equally—at least not yet. Though I do think we're getting closer, which is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about where I stand on all of this.

[silverpill@mitra.social]

@hongminhee

I'm writing this in English.

Do you, though? Your writing style was different in the past, so I am pretty sure that you now machine-translate, or perhaps use an LLM writing assistant.

To be honest, the non-slop version of you was much better.

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

@silverpill@mitra.social Yes, I used an LLM to help write it. I wrote my thoughts in Korean first, then had it translated. That's kind of the whole point I was making.

I'm not a native English speaker. When I write long-form English on my own, it's slow and the result is often not what I actually meant. Using a tool to bridge that gap doesn't make the thoughts less mine. It makes them more accurately mine, not less. A non-native speaker hiring a copy editor wouldn't get this reaction.

I'll grant you that “the non-slop version of you” stings a little. But I'd rather be legible and called slop than be authentic and misread.

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

From back when I used to flip through a thick dictionary, taking a minute for each sentence, to now, when I use an LLM to write in English, people don't realize that I'm personally speaking to them in English for their sake. Honestly, I just want to speak in Korean. I hate English.

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

To be precise, it's not English as a language that I hate, but English as a form of power.

[silverpill@mitra.social]

@hongminhee Authenticity matters. When I see slop I usually just ignore it, because reading it is like watching paint dry, and I think I am not alone in that.
You're basically the only person with whom I continue to communicate despite all of this.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@hongminhee 저는 당신이 영어를 싫어하는지 몰랐습니다. 영어가 모국어라서 사람들이 제 필요에 맞춰주는 것에 익숙해져 있었습니다. 앞으로는 당신의 글을 한국어(아니면 일본어?)로 읽고, 저도 한국어로 답해 보겠습니다.

[lain_7@tldr.nettime.org]

@silverpill @hongminhee

I don’t interject this as an attack, but please realize that when you say “AI slop” you say “sloppy person who uses AI”.

@hongminhee very clearly is not such a person, so please don’t imply they are, even if they chose an assistant you disapprove of to help them communicate.

I am irritated by the term “AI slop” because it shifts the responsibility from the user to their tool, from the way they use the tool to something that’s inevitable.

[ddelemeny@mastodon.xyz]

@hongminhee @silverpill Hi. I'm curious (as a non-native english speaker on the other side of the argument), what gives you the confidence that machine translation won't be misread ?
I'd be way less secure about my criticism of MT if the tools were able to probe the author for meaning but we're not quite there, and I think that MT in the hands of a polyglot-ish author has better chances of being somewhat useful (at least it's a huge difference from unedited/unverified client-side translations).

[hypolite@friendica.mrpetovan.com]

@hongminhee @Gargron I’m sympathetic with your position of being on the language fringe on the Internet, because English is so dominant. My mother tongue is French, and I had to learn English as part of the mandatory French education.

I still don’t share your partial defense of LLMs. Even anglophones will misconstrue each other’s argument and put words in each other’s mouth even though no machine translation was involved, no matter how up-to-date it would be.

Furthermore, you mention “the people [you’re] addressing”, which for me is key. I could have replied to you in French, and yet I didn’t, because I want you to understand what I’m saying, and I don’t have any evidence you’d better understand me in French than in English. So yes, as soon as you choose a specific audience to address, it falls on you to pick the most appropriate language, there’s no way around it.

Now if I wrote something in French and an anglophone started arguing with me over a poor machine-translated version of my text, it wouldn’t be my responsibility. The text would have been meant for a specific audience which they were obviously not a part of. The fact that it would be public doesn’t mean everybody in the world is entitled to a clear understanding of it, and it is neither your or my fault.

Machine translation has always been a crutch, useful but limited, and no technological progress will erase the inherent friction of publicly expressing yourself on the Internet, because this friction exists even among speakers of the same language.

[ddelemeny@mastodon.xyz]

@hongminhee @silverpill I really think there could be a lot to do in terms of bridging the fluency gap in terms of UX. You refer to your experience flipping pages of dictionaries, and I relate to that quite hard : that's where I'd like to see effort and change in software.
However, I feel comfortable bearing the responsibility of making my speech accessible to an English or Spanish speaker that doesn't speak French, and any failure would be mine.