Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

"Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

correresmidestino.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 408 posts

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#361

Post by rikroots »

tombert wrote: post #9

I have no doubt that the writer is better at translating than AI, but I have to say that AI translation has gotten so good that I'm not sure how much longer translation work will be there, or rather it might end up being more about auditing. For example, I just read the Lawrence Ellsworth translation of The Three Musketeers, which I very thoroughly enjoyed. I don't speak or read French, but from my understanding Ells…

I learned last year that "translation" can be a very tricky thing. Because there's never a one-to-one correlation between one language's words, phrases, structures and metaphors, and another language's equivalent stuff. And LLM translations may not be the actual translation you want, or need.

I wrote up my experiences of translating Lorca and Cavafy poems here[1]. tl;dr: I have developed a massive new respect for translators; however much they're being paid, they probably need to be paid more!

[1] - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/adventures-in-poetry...

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#363

Post by FeteCommuniste »

bandrami wrote: post #288
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagined it as kind of a shorthand for "you should be spending my tokens on looking for / addressing issues like X, Y, and Z," where X, Y, and Z are the sorts of things that an expert in [insert domain here] would be likely to care most about.

At some point we have to just admit we're mass cargo-culting here and that these secret invocations people swear by have the same epistemic value as medieval superstitions.

I don't know, I was never one to "assign roles" to AI myself, but if it ends up working for some people in practice, then I guess it might be worth examining why.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#364

Post by [deleted] »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #353
Aurornis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I use AI for all my medical questions and doctors use AI to write software, and we both smirk at the quality the other person is getting from it. There is an interesting third group emerging: People who acknowledge the quality problem, but think they can deal with it by applying more AI to the output. This takes the form of people who spin up a lot of "agents" and give them personalities like security d…

I'm in a similar-ish boat here. I acknowledge that what I paid an LLM $100 to develop isn't as good as what if pay a human $100,000 to do, but it's "good enough" to solve the problem.

[deleted]

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#365

Post by fzeroracer »

mapmeld wrote: post #5

I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.

I think the only people that genuinely think AI translation is viable are those that never read in the first place.

There are a number of games I've seen and played on Steam which use MTL to get the game playable in English and universally the translation is absolute shit. Sentences that don't transition into another, wordplay that becomes nonsense and a completely flat affect to everything.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#367

Post by j_w »

Ekaros wrote: post #339
j_w wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who regularly reads translated works, including the occasional machine translation (MTL), they (MTL) suck. You got a hugely biased result, which you recognize. Translation is hard. If you're familiar with reading translations from specific languages MTL works have a very specific smell to them, it's a bit hard to describe but it's there. A good translation is miles (kilometers, for those outside of the US…

I read genres where MTL is somewhat commonly used. But good quality human translations take remarkable effort. And even artistic choices. Like choices between transliterating and translating. Or maybe in some cases just doing both for single name or term. And then keeping these choices consistent over substantial works. And it is not like transliteration is consistent thing. Some cases would prefer the old way. Or ex…

It definitely takes a lot of work. I've read that it takes a good writer themselves to translate well, since it's such an artistic endeavor.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#369

Post by rciorba »

ibudiallo wrote: post #179

Slight tangent into translations: I read two translations of the book "The Master and Margarita". My first read was so boring I couldn't help but stop reading before the end of the first chapter. I can't find the copy and the name of the person who translated it, but this one had all the Russian nicknames translated. It kept talking about a guy called homeless. I thought it was just a bad book and dismissed it for ye…

I read the first Dune books in Romanian, then re-read the first one in English, and I was amazed at how nice the translation was. I actually prefer it to the original. For example, stillsuit sounds really basic, but distrai, a portmanteau of "a distila" (to distil) and "strai" (old word for clothes) lands differently for me.
Post reply on HN