Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs.
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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 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. That’s 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 dubbing… 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 it’s only half the story.
Puns are horrible to translate, you either just skip them because they just don’t work, or you go to extremes to wring some kind of joke out of them.
There isn’t necessarily a right approach here. This particular Pratchett translation apparently skipped a lot, but I also remember a HHGTTG translation that took the “a joke at *any* cost” 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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@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. That’s 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 dubbing… and all those languages in subtitles, plus some more.
So it is really difficult for them to be exposed to non-English content,
@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.
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there's a universe of this stuff out there
my favorite is from the 2008 beijing olympics, a restaurant translating its name for foreign visitors, and dutifully announcing what the translation service fed back to them
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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.
My main use case for machine translations is spot checking words in languages I don't know as well as I should.
They are great for that.
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@Sonikku there is absolutely no way this is real
@AVincentInSpace it literally is haha. Fellowship was just as bad.
I was still dialup back in those days so I’d order my bootleg DVDs from a dude in Hong Kong and I just about died laughing when I turned on subtitles randomly
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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 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.
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@Gargron Machine translated UIs are even worse a crime. LLMs don't have the slightest idea of the context of some random button, and (looking at Microsoft's German UI translations recently) seem to choose the worst possible word to drop into that.
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Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@mullvadnet Great writeup, raising awareness on this is very important. Mullvad reporting thoroughly on this topic, I appreciate it.
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Ho rivisto Ferngully. 🌺🌿
Che bello che è, che bella che era la sensibilità ambientalista degli anni '90.
Che bello essere cresciuta con un immaginario e una scala di valori che tuttora definisce il mio nucleo.
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@grumpygamer too late, Peter Molyneux did it.
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@mcc @grumpygamer it feels like it has a lot in common with games about piles of sticks (building them, disassembling them, etc)
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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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@mcc @grumpygamer@mastodon.gamedev.place
sounds a lot like the legendary fork bomb.
