this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Thanks to @[email protected] for finding the original author:

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (24 children)

Oh man is translation not possible with AI. You have no idea how little languages have in common. A lot of terms don't mean a thing, but combine concepts you don't have or associate to point at a thing.

My dad said, about learning a new language, ''cat means cat, not gato, don't translate'' and I think that holds up pretty well from my experience.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

Oh man is translation not possible with AI.

i mean, it's pretty good at it? A lot of human translators even struggle with the same problem, the AI is just a lot faster, and significantly more versatile. That's arguably one of it's strongest areas of performance, is translation, because it's so well suited to it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It's still doing a consistently poorer job than a skilled translator, because it has no concept of nuance or tone. I encounter people getting themselves worked up over information in AI-translated news articles, so I go back to the source material and discover it's mistranslated, under-translated, or just completely omitted parts of sentences. It's very Purple Monkey Dishwasher.

The quality is better than it was a decade ago, sure, but that's a pretty low bar. Back then it was gibberish, nowadays it's natural-sounding phrases with incorrect translations.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

this is true, but for the average person, who just wants to translate something to make it make somewhat sense, it's great.

Though yeah, you can't really trust it, there's a lot of intricacies.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

And yet, translators are losing their jobs left and right, from what I hear. Sure, quality has gone down, but most people don't seem to care. Plus, in a lot of cases, instead of the AI doing all the work, translators proof-read AI generated texts and correct the worst mistakes. Fewer translators can translate more at a lower price this way.

Does the quality still go down a bit that way? Probably. But again, who cares? Not the people spending money on translations, that's for sure.

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