I'm writing this in English.

[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.

[clv1@mastodon.social]

@fastfinge @hongminhee This cultural selectiveness is why I am for a constructed auxiliary language as lingua franca. The most popular is Esperanto, but there are technically better projects nowadays.

[patricus@gts.posix.live]

@clv1 @fastfinge @hongminhee well, that isn't possible as such a language would need to be usable *somewhere* on it's start.

[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.

[fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca]

@patricus @hongminhee @clv1 It also doesn't solve any of the problems of "just learn English": can you afford the lessons? Do you have the cognitive ability to learn two languages? Do you have the time for the lessons? Are teachers and materials available? Are they accessible? Do you have a place to practice outside of the classroom? Also, "let's erase everyone's culture" doesn't sound, to me, like any better of an answer than "let's make one culture king".

I speak as someone who studied French for eight years straight, an hour a day, and never managed to pass a single course. There are people who just literally can't, when it comes to language learning. I'm one of them. Though to be fair, it's almost certainly a combination of the environment, the instruction, and other factors, rather than some flaw innate to me. But either way, I've never found a method that works.

I actually toyed with learning Korean, thinking that maybe it was the gendered nature of French, as well as the spelling, that was the problem. Plus I thought a more regular alphabet might help me. But after eight years of bashing my head against the French wall, I just...couldn't. Picking up a new language course felt like going back to hell, and I couldn't make myself stick with it for more than a week.

[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.