I'm writing this in English.

[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).

[zdl@mstdn.social]

@clv1 @fastfinge @hongminhee Esperanto is a terrible choice as an auxiliary language. It's not much easier for speakers of most languages than English is, being full of unnecessary things like a myriad of declensions: declining for number, gender, tense, aspect, word form, etc. But hey, at least it has maybe 50,000 L1 speakers.

[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.

[clv1@mastodon.social]

@fastfinge @patricus @hongminhee Auxiliary languages are constructed to be easier on purpose. A regular alphabet is only one of many features that must be easy on a lingua franca, and there isn't a single natural language whose all features are easy. As for cognitive ability, as far as I've observed, it seems that the teaching method counts a lot. Have you tried different methods?

[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.

[fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca]

@clv1 @hongminhee @patricus Yup! With French, I tried:
* in-person classroom instruction (both in school and extra-curricular): material is often inaccessible, teachers are mixed quality, I eventually lag behind everyone else in the room and get left behind
* total emersion (I live in Canada and have extended family that doesn't speak English): I never manage to take anything in, and just freeze up when addressed directly
* independent correspondence courses: materials are more accessible and I can go at my own pace, but no matter how I study, I can't pass the tests or use what I've tried to learn in real life
* apps (duolingo): accessibility varies. I eventually get pretty good at doing the exercises offered in the app, but that never generalizes in a way that lets me pass any formal tests or use the language

My measures of success are:
* able to have basic conversations in the language
* able to pass Canadian government tests to be certified in the language for career purposes

I have never achieved either of the above. And after eight years of failures, I've pretty much given up.

[julian@activitypub.space]

@hongminhee@hollo.social I think your post makes me think more critically about the use of LLMs for translation services. It is easy for me to judge from a position of privilege because I am a native English speaker, and I do not realize the access I am given simply because of it.

While reading your post it also made me think about the sacrifices you made to contribute to this community. There are precious few people in the Asia-Pacific region who regularly contribute to AP development, and a large part of that is the language barrier.

If LLM-translation makes the AP development community less euro-america-centric, then I am all for it. Cultural differences we can work through, but language barriers are harder to bypass!

Aside, congratulations for making it onto Hacker News front page :)

[patricus@gts.posix.live]

@clv1 @fastfinge @hongminhee nah, I just heard someone speak Esperanto and I was like: yeah I'll die trying to learn this.

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

@ddelemeny@mastodon.xyz @silverpill@mitra.social The confidence comes from an asymmetry I suspect many non-native speakers will recognize: I can read English much better than I can write it.

When I write in English on my own, I often know, as I'm writing, that something is off—that the sentence doesn't carry the weight I intended, or that the nuance I wanted is somewhere between the words I've chosen. I just don't always know how to fix it. When I write in Korean first and then work with an LLM, I can read the result and check it against what I meant. Sometimes I'll see a phrase and think: yes, exactly that, I didn't know how to get there myself. That moment of recognition is the verification step.

So I'm not trusting the machine blindly. I'm using my reading ability—which is reasonably good—to audit an output that my writing ability couldn't have produced alone. It's an imperfect process, but it's not as unmoored as handing a text to a system and walking away.

Your point about polyglot authors is well taken. The tool works better when the person using it can actually evaluate what it produces. I'd agree that's a meaningful distinction.

[patricus@gts.posix.live]

@clv1 @fastfinge @hongminhee also, it needs to sound cool when I was little, English sounded cool, I wanted to learn it, so I learned, as fast as I could, I asked my parents to find some native speaker to talk to, I was getting better and better. because I knew, English sounds cool so.

[fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca]

@hongminhee @clv1 @patricus I actually did seriously consider some sort of genetic problem. My grandmother (on my father's side) was a French speaker who had the exact same problems learning English. She took dozens of courses over her life, but never actually learned anything. And yet, both me and my grandmother have won awards for writing in our native languages, and had our writing published. My aunts and uncles are all bilingual, but none of my cousins on that side of the family are: they either speak only French or only English, just like me. So that's a strong pattern. On the other hand, the idea of a genetic inability to learn a second language just seems silly. Why wouldn't it make it harder to learn a first language?

[ddelemeny@mastodon.xyz]

@hongminhee @silverpill I see. One personal reason I don't want to rely on translators and prefer the "hard" way, is that I believe my reading and understanding is sharpened by my attempts at writing. That's the essence of the "immersion in a language" argument for me, and I have experienced it several times (positively by being immersed in English and Spanish speaking cultures, and negatively by lack of it in German and Korean). Do you relate to that ?

[ddelemeny@mastodon.xyz]

@hongminhee @silverpill How do you think translators shape or maintain your abilities in a foreign language, as opposed to research and experimentation ?

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

@julian@activitypub.space Thank you for saying this. The ActivityPub development community being Euro-America-centric isn't just a cultural observation. It shapes what gets built, what use cases are considered, and whose needs are treated as edge cases. Language is a big part of that, and I'm glad the point landed.

And yes, apparently the chardet post found its audience. I was not expecting that particular piece to take off, but I'll take it!

[julian@activitypub.space]

@hongminhee@hollo.social do you think your writing skills will improve with continued reading of the LLM-reflected translations, to the point where you may no longer need it?

[phnt@fluffytail.org]

@hongminhee @silverpill Maybe consider writing posts in both languages, Korean and English. Multi-language posting on the protocol side is in its early infancy and basically does not exist, but you at least don't seem to have the arbitrary character limit on posts that a certain blue elephant has. It might not be a bad idea to take advantage of that. Even if the english part is slightly broken, there is still the possibility of defaulting to a translation.

Not sure how that would hold up in reality, but it seems like a reasonable option to me, even though translators in $current_year are getting worse instead of better in general. Google Translate is barely usable now.

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

@ddelemeny@mastodon.xyz @silverpill@mitra.social I relate to the immersion argument, and I think it's part of why I avoided machine translation for so long—not out of principle, but because the output wasn't worth learning from. Older MT between Korean and English produced something closer to a word-by-word skeleton than actual language. You couldn't look at it and think: oh, that's how a native speaker would put it. It was more like a scaffold you had to tear down before building anything.

LLMs are different enough that I've had to revise that instinct. The output is often genuinely idiomatic, and when I read a phrase that lands exactly right, there's a recognition that functions a lot like learning—the same feeling as encountering a sentence in a book and thinking: I'll remember that. I do find myself absorbing expressions that way, probably more than I would have expected.

That said, I think your point holds at the edges. For shorter writing I still work without assistance, partly for practical reasons and partly because I notice the difference when I don't. So I suspect I'm arriving at something similar to what you're describing, just from the other direction—using the tool for longer texts while trying to keep the muscle from atrophying entirely on shorter ones.

The dynamic you mention with German and Korean is interesting too. Korean was my concern about English; I imagine the lack of immersion shapes the experience in ways that are hard to compensate for with tools alone.

[hypolite@friendica.mrpetovan.com]

@lain_7 It would be the case if these tools weren't aggressively integrated in everything we use. If there's a murky water tap in your city, then it's up to the users to appropriately filter the output for safe consumption. Now if the murky water tap is forcibly installed in every household because the city received bribes for it, then the responsibility shifts from individual users to the murky water tap provider. Even if users can get somewhat safe water from adequate filtration.

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

@julian@activitypub.space I actually just addressed something close to this in a reply up the thread—might be worth a read!

[hongminhee@hollo.social]

@phnt@fluffytail.org Multilingual posting is something I've actually been thinking about and experimenting with already. I'm building a fediverse platform for software developers called Hackers' Pub, where I've been prototyping exactly this kind of feature. My other project, @hollo@hollo.social, is where I post from right now, and I'd like to bring something similar there eventually—the main obstacle is that most fediverse platforms don't properly render multilingual posts even when they receive them—the protocol already supports it via contentMap, but implementations like Mastodon tend to pick one language arbitrarily rather than presenting all of them.

Outside the fediverse, my blog already works this way: each post is written in multiple languages (Korean, Japanese, and English), not as translations filed separately but as the same post published in all three. It's a pattern I find natural given how I actually think and write across languages.

On Google Translate: I stopped using it for Korean–English a long time ago, for the same reasons you'd expect. These days I mostly use Kagi Translate, which is LLM-based and noticeably better for distant language pairs. The gap between that and older MT is stark enough that I think “machine translation” has started to mean two quite different things depending on which generation of tools you're talking about.