Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs.

[gargron@mastodon.social]

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.

[erikuden@mastodon.de]

@Gargron thank you. When writing the German subtitles for No Other Land I had to basically do it all by hand because the context window was so narrow it got everything wrong that could be lost in translation.

[erikuden@mastodon.de]

@Gargron machine learning can utilize all written text to help understand language and make translations better?? So basically my plagiarism machine is justified. Got em.

[galaxis@mastodon.infra.de]

@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.

[gargron@mastodon.social]

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.

[teledyn@mstdn.ca]

@Gargron

My son had nagged for weeks about some vintage game cartridge he'd read about. For Christmas I chanced upon the game, but the original Japanese version. Google had introduced live video translation so …

It was hilarious; even with a domain expert beside me we couldn't follow the game.

[dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz]

@Gargron
In the actual literature, pre-machine translation, it was well-established that translation amounts to authorship, with the clear example of poetry -- translating poetry into a new language is absolutely an act of authorship, not a mechanical act.

It may be somewhat less true of other kinds of works, but now we're talking about degree, not of kind.

Admittedly LLM translation is pretty handy sometimes when there's no other translation alternative, but we must be prepared for it to fail utterly at times -- like other uses of LLMs.

[hashraydamon@me.dm]

@Gargron or Google's auto translated crab, Voice or text is atrocious

[djrndm@chaos.social]

@Gargron Denkt einfach nur an Erik Simons Übersetzungen der Witcher-Reihe (und "Etwas endet, etwas beginnt"-Kurzgeschichten). Viele Wortspiele aus dem Polnischen würden 1:1 gar nicht funktionieren. Deshalb hat Erik Simon, wie ein guter Übersetzer das tut, sich eine Menge künstlerischen Freiraums erlaubt, um den Sinn und Wortwitz des Originals zu erhalten, wo immer nötig.

[inanedirk@metalhead.club]

@Gargron ironically, I feel translations have become worse with the rise of LLMs. For example, I recently saw a Microsoft KB article that had a table with Yes / No in its cells, translated to German as Ja / Nr.

[vilelasagna@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@Gargron Back in my pretentious high schooler days I read Dante's Comedy and, don't know where from, the version I found was one that was like... fully translated as poetry, like in the Italian* original, going as far as trying to replicate the rhyme structure

No computer's ever going to pull off anything even remotely that mad

[pozuelen@mastodon.social]

@Gargron totalmente de acuerdo, compañero.

[jernej__s@infosec.exchange]

@Gargron I've seen way too many machine-translated instructions, and that's something you really don't want to have machine-translated, for obvious reasons.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@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.

[tacas@donphan.social]

@Gargron Crunchyroll also experiments with machine translated subtitles for Japanese anime, and the community (anglophone or not) is not happy with it.

[funcrunch@me.dm]

@Gargron - I think the most recent translated book series I read was Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy,* translated into English by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen. I don't know a word of Chinese, but I can't imagine machine translation doing these great works any justice.

* Later adapted into the Netflix series 3 Body Problem

[steve@social.coop]

@Gargron As someone who translates into English, I appreciate you saying this.

It's true there's a lot of very good literature in English, but I'm pretty convinced that the majority of anglophones don't know what they're missing by not reading translated books.

[jernej__s@infosec.exchange]

@inanedirk @Gargron Microsoft uses machine translations on their pages extensively, and the results are a mess. They even OCR and translate the screenshots, so you end up with screenshots that have wrong text crammed over the English original, making them doubly useless.

[virgilpierce@nerdculture.de]

@Gargron plus doesn't everyone do the test of translate then translate back? They are garbage in a way that even a machine could recognize as garbage.

[ccferrie@mastodon.ie]

@cstross @Gargron I have a friend who worked for years as a translator (English to French) but in recent years he found that he was no longer being asked to translate but to "post-edit" machine translations. It was taking him just as long, paying him less, and destroying his soul.

He now works as a tour guide.