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Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear
#12> I hope that the fact I can write well enough in my mother language in some way it is still visibile in my English posts
I don't know if it's GPT-4 or an actual editing typo but using "visibile" instead of "visible" in that sentence is actually quite ironically funny.
On the post itself, I totally understand the point being bilingual myself with English being my second language. However, now having been living 11 years in the UK, I'm more comfortable with writing in English.
Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear
#13I was recently in Fiji - of note, Google Translate does not support Fijian; however GPT-4 did a lovely job of it.
GenAI is going to be transformative for low-resource languages - both making their content available to a global audience (outbound) as well as helping those that only know a rare language have access to content in all.
Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear
#14There are a lot of grammar errors and other awkward phrases in this translated blog post. Still pretty readable but worth noting it isn't a perfect translation (especially in the context of Duolingo or other learning services leveraging AI).
Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear
#15LLMs offer a big advantage over other types of machine translation: they can translate the source text in multiple ways. You can then pick and choose from among those versions to produce the final wording that you like best.
Here are five translations of the same passage from a speech by the Japanese prime minister. They were all prepared by GPT-4 from a single prompt:
1. Since becoming Prime Minister, I have visited many ASEAN countries. I recently returned from visits to Malaysia and the Philippines. In every country, I have felt the depth of business ties with Japan and the strength of personal connections beyond business.
2. As Prime Minister, I have had the opportunity to visit numerous ASEAN countries. Just recently, I traveled to Malaysia and the Philippines. Everywhere I went, I witnessed the profound business connections with Japan, as well as the enduring personal relationships that transcend business.
3. Since my appointment as Prime Minister, I've visited several ASEAN countries. My recent trips included Malaysia and the Philippines. In each country, the depth of business connections with Japan and the enduring strength of interpersonal relationships beyond business were evident.
4. In my role as Prime Minister, I've visited many ASEAN countries. Recently, I was in Malaysia and the Philippines. In each nation, I felt the depth of Japan's business ties and the robustness of personal connections that go beyond mere business.
5. As Prime Minister, I've had the honor of visiting several ASEAN countries. My recent travels took me to Malaysia and the Philippines. In every country, the strength of Japan's business ties and the resilience of personal relationships beyond business were apparent.
The prompt I used and the full source text and translations are here:
Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear
#16There are a lot of grammar errors and other awkward phrases in this translated blog post. Still pretty readable but worth noting it isn't a perfect translation (especially in the context of Duolingo or other learning services leveraging AI).
That’s because this post wasn’t written with the help of LLMs:
> the post you are reading is not just written by myself, but as the tradition in this blog demands, not even re-read or corrected if not for a quick second pass. This way you can see what my written English really is, and if you are curious, compare it with the post about LLMs. The difference is not less than huge.
The post on LLMs reads quite a bit more fluently in English: http://antirez.com/news/140
Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear
#17There are a lot of grammar errors and other awkward phrases in this translated blog post. Still pretty readable but worth noting it isn't a perfect translation (especially in the context of Duolingo or other learning services leveraging AI).
That’s because this post wasn’t written with the help of LLMs: > the post you are reading is not just written by myself, but as the tradition in this blog demands, not even re-read or corrected if not for a quick second pass. This way you can see what my written English really is, and if you are curious, compare it with the post about LLMs. The difference is not less than huge. The post on LLMs reads quite a bit more…
Ah my mistake, I read that but thought that "not just written by myself" meant it was written by him with the LLM. I see now that this was not LLM augmented, it was the other post that was.
I do see some grammar errors still in the opening paragraphs of the LLM translated post on first look though...
For example: "Countless hours spent searching for documentation on peculiar, intellectually uninteresting aspects; the efforts to learn an overly complicated API, often without good reason; writing immediately usable programs that I would discard after a few hours."
Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear
#18The author quips at the fact no one will learn a new language. I'm just waiting for my babble fish
If you live in an Anglophone country you already don't need to do so, although there will probably be cultural value to do so indefinitely. I love learning languages but ultimately it's for fun and to make friends and it's such a time commitment...
Its not the 'cultural value', but the learning value.
Natively understanding another language gives you access to a whole different information sphere. With different taboos and focuses. So topics completely undiscussable or unpolite in one language, is perfectly analyzed in another language. I've noticed the level of censorship significantly increasing on dominant English platforms (Say youtube), which is harder to see, if you can only speak English.
This makes it very easy to identify cultural shibboleths, disinfo or even just low-relevance/importance information.
However, this only works if you truly have native language levels in two languages. If you find it 'painful'/'difficult' to read the second language in any way, you'll avoid it outside of work, and therefore forfeit the advantage. This is also why even the inconvenience of translation will destroy this advantage.
Also, this requires the second language to be sufficiently distant from the first, while still being a large-population language.
So knowing Danish/Irish perfectly doesn't give you access to a whole different worldview.
This criteria is harsh, and for more entertainment/cultural value, LLM translation is basically good enough even for novels, there's no point in learning a foreign language at a low level anymore.
Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear
#19The other post referred to, but not linked, as best I can make out on mobile: http://antirez.com/news/140
That's it indeed. Thanks.
For what it's worth, I prefer your non-LLM writing style.
Sure, it has some grammar mistakes and is awkward in a few places. I actually read it in my head with an Italian accent. But it reads to me like you in a way that the LLM post doesn't.
Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s because this post wasn’t written with the help of LLMs: > the post you are reading is not just written by myself, but as the tradition in this blog demands, not even re-read or corrected if not for a quick second pass. This way you can see what my written English really is, and if you are curious, compare it with the post about LLMs. The difference is not less than huge. The post on LLMs reads quite a bit more…
Ah my mistake, I read that but thought that "not just written by myself" meant it was written by him with the LLM. I see now that this was not LLM augmented, it was the other post that was. I do see some grammar errors still in the opening paragraphs of the LLM translated post on first look though... For example: "Countless hours spent searching for documentation on peculiar, intellectually uninteresting aspects; the…
That's maybe a bit informal in that it's not a sentence. But I wouldn't call it ungrammatical except from a prescriptive-grammarian viewpoint -- I read a lot and I wouldn't notice it in context.