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Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

antirez.com

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Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

#51

Post by pona-a »

tkgally wrote: post #15

LLMs 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…

I think it's rather crude and inefficient to generate several translations with a prompt.

Can't we just sample different "branches" of successive tokens with some mechanism for ensuring diversity like [1] did? This would allow the user to edit a handful of words/phrases/sentences and guide the LLM towards a more idiomatic translation.

This may even give smaller local models a chance.

[1] https://suricrasia.online/blog/making-amulets-with-llama/

Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

#52

Post by PoignardAzur »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #49
boredhedgehog wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I call this the "Google Maps effect", the more you use Google Maps, the less you learn about city streets, etc. I call it the "pocket lighter effect". The more you rely on pocket lighters, the less you learn about kindling and fires. But for some reason, people don't fear this development.

You don't have to pay rent to big tech to use a lighter.

That's not a knock-down argument, OpenStreetMap and open-weights LLMs are a thing.

Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

#53

Post by hoseja »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #49
boredhedgehog wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I call this the "Google Maps effect", the more you use Google Maps, the less you learn about city streets, etc. I call it the "pocket lighter effect". The more you rely on pocket lighters, the less you learn about kindling and fires. But for some reason, people don't fear this development.

You don't have to pay rent to big tech to use a lighter.

You do need to pay rent to Big Petrol though.

Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

#54

Post by 48864w6ui »

munificent wrote: post #19
antirez wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If more people went ahead with literal translations of their L1 idioms and style into English, we'd all have a richer lingua franca. In the mouth of the wolf, Antirez!

Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

#55

Post by nanolith »

shaneoh wrote: post #47
nanolith wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents bought me a GPS unit when I first moved away. While using it was convenient, I discovered that I did not actually learn to orient myself with respect to that city. It wasn't until my GPS unit was stolen and I had to go at it on my own that my mental map "snapped" into place. That is one reason why I'm hesitant to use LLMs to the extent that so many have. If we don't use certain skills, we lose them. I lear…

How did you get your French back up to snuff?

I'm using a combination of Duolingo, Babbel, watching and reading French content, and live drilling with local French speakers. Since I live in the US, it's difficult to replicate immersion here, but I do what I can.

I'm also studying Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, and Esperanto. These aren't (yet) as intensive as the French, but a bucket list item of mine is to become a polyglot. Fluency isn't likely, but I should at least be able to chat with folks about food, the weather, and other pleasantries. Yeah, the language selections center on Europe and the Americas, but these languages are at least somewhat interrelated, which means that I get a boost when learning them, since I already know English and some French.

Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

#57

Post by Engineering-MD »

famouswaffles wrote: post #44
neom wrote: post #10

It's insane to me much how much better GPT-4 is than Papago at Korean, and Papago was the gold standard for Korean translation for quite some time. It also performs much better than DeepL in Korean.

Example, for the curious - https://imgur.com/a/XtH7dZt

I think it’s interesting chatGPT is the only that doesn’t use the word bees in the translation.

Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

#58

Post by amadeuspagel »

turminal wrote: post #23
dweekly wrote: post #13

I 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.

Also probably going to speed up language extinction :(

You can ask ChatGPT questions in any language, but StackOverflow only in english.

Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

#59

Post by nathanasmith »

Grimblewald wrote: post #35
jiggawatts wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the freakish thing was having GPT-4 complete the prefix of a script, which was mostly a doc-comment and the inputs, written in my style. The completed body of the script was also in my style, even though I had not given GPT any actual "code" in the prompt. It somehow had learned that people that write the preamble "just so" also write script logic in a certain specific way, and it could emulate that.

One of the bigger difficulties with coming to terms with LLMs is that we are either far simpler and easy to model than we once thought, or LLMs are vastly more complex than we comprehend. I am not sure I like either.

The ease with which LLMs mimic mundane human behavior has, in some small ways, helped me prioritize my own thoughts and actions. I'll be doing something and realize an LLM could easily perform this action, complete this thought, have this conversation as well as I can. So why am I doing this when my time would probably be better served in pursuit of something else. I don't want to go overboard with this since many mundane things have merit but it does help pull me out of a rut occasionally.

Re: Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

#60

Post by tmm84 »

I have recently tried out using GPT4 and other LLMs to help with writing documentation in another language (I speak, read and write it good enough for daily tasks but technical writing is a challenge). I tried it mostly out of the pure fact that many people who knew me at the workplace enjoyed my documentation and code comments because they kinda reflected a comedic / frank nature of what was going on in the code/program. However, it always struck a nerve that my writing while not native or technical brought enjoyment but the need to provide quality technical documents was something I always felt. So, instead of having a co-worker take time to explain what parts of my sentence were non-technical or could be clearer an LLM is more than happy to tell me so I can write better. I feel that when it comes to linguistics LLMs can help those who need to communicate at higher levels get better with less proof-reading required before publishing. It isn't the machine translation of yesterday and it won't replace human interaction but it certainly in my case helps to make my sentences more nuanced to the native audience.
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