I'm writing this in English.

[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.

[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.

[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 :)

[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.