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 Yes. My wife for years shunned Pratchett completely because she read a Dutch translation in the 90s.
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I don't get the machine translation argument. LLMs do even that poorly, certainly noticeably worse than a purpose-trained translation model, which is I believe what at least Google Translate uses.
My pet peeve about machine translation is how someone at Google and Microsoft thought that it's a good idea to "helpfully" translate developer documentation into your system language by default. As in, you have to look for a button to read it in English. Who in their right mind could possibly want that?..
@grishka @Gargron Yeah, and at least when it comes to some types of documents you can end up learning the source language quirks or the machine translation quirks (like random gender assignments), but if it's an unknown/random source language then you're out of luck.
(Hence why I always want the source material as well whenever machine translation has been used, so at least the obviously broken parts can be fixed, potentially with a dictionary, or could ask someone who knows the source language) -
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 am an anglophone, but read in French from time to time. I tend to have a machine translator nearby to augment my poor vocabulary. Last book I read it told me nineteenth century Breton people had horses hoofs on their feet. The actual translation should have been clogs.
This stuff is constant, that's just one I remember
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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.
on the plus side, machine translation illuminated me as to the involvement of the presbyterian church in the famous movie "backstroke of the west"
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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 feel pretty dumb telling this to the master, but translating a literary work is much more than changing one word for another. Even it you keep all the meaning, it gets weird and doesn't flow; each language has its own rhythm and cadence. A good translator frequently has to completely rewrite a paragraph to keep the sense, the emotions and the flow of the story. Even worse, he needs to make it faithful to the original, which having intermediate versions can make harder.
I'm not a professional translator, but I have tried to translate some public domain stories, and found that automatic translation is a hindrance. I had to rewrite nearly all, looking always to the original version. It was too easy to drift far from it and get the text and the author absolutely distorted.
It is a work of art and love, not something a machine can do at all. Not even a part of it.
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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 addition a lot of anglophone people speak only one language, so they've never been able to compare the translation of a book between two languages they speak.
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on the plus side, machine translation illuminated me as to the involvement of the presbyterian church in the famous movie "backstroke of the west"
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undefined _elena@mastodon.social shared this topic
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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
And it's not just expressions and turns of phrase, which are unique not only to each language but easily to each region.It's words. There is often no exact match. Many words in one language are not a precise correspondence to those in another.
So an elegant turn of phrase in one becomes a wordy explanation in the other. Or a misinterpretation.
Only someone fluent in both languages can convey the true meaning accurately and eloquently.
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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 and worth repeating the quality directly depends on the quality of actual human translated text corpus.
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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.
Well said. π
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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? -
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 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 think anglophones experience start difference between good and bad translations more often through video games
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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 and then there's the question on how it's used
see firefox that generated new translations and threw awai human written ones -
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 As an LLM would say to a translator: "All your job are belong to us".
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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 to make matters worde, at least in the UK when you buy a DVD it only comes with English audio, English audio with descriptions, and maybe original audio, and just English subtitles, and English for the hard of hearing. Thatβs it. But in Spain, the same DVD, locked to the same region, carried the original audio, audio described English audio, Spanish dubbing, German dubbing, Italian dubbingβ¦ and all those languages in subtitles, plus some more.
So it is really difficult for them to be exposed to non-English content,
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@aeduna @Gargron Oh yes. Translating the story is one thing, but especially with Pratchett itβs only half the story.
Puns are horrible to translate, you either just skip them because they just donβt work, or you go to extremes to wring some kind of joke out of them.
There isnβt necessarily a right approach here. This particular Pratchett translation apparently skipped a lot, but I also remember a HHGTTG translation that took the βa joke at *any* costβ path and um.
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@Sonikku there is absolutely no way this is real
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this kind of bad translations /autosubtitles is the best comedy to my neurodivergent brain.
i speak several languages and always try to find out where it went wrong too, so it's educating too :)
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@mcc @grumpygamer damn this is an extremely interesting mathematical question. What is the expected mean number of dies when the process stops?
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@benroyce @requiem @AVincentInSpace @neil I'd say it's YoDEL (You Don't Even Live) if the slopmachine is a chief actor.
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@book on the one hand, I have definitely heard and read it, and I would have used the expression. On the other, I am not a native English speaker so take my experience with a grain of salt
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@neil so basically, human over AI means people just have to be honest they're feeding you slop, got it
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@atomicpoet anything as long as it remains in the discourse
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@Space_Burger_Steve @afreytes no, thank you for the explanation! I love culinary cultural exchanges!
