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Claude 3 beats Google Translate

arxiv.org

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Re: Claude 3 beats Google Translate

#111

Post by _giorgio_ »

jampekka wrote: post #98
_giorgio_ wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So anything except encoder decoder translation is accidental? Crazy way to define research.

Research, especially in academia, isn't usually that interested in the single concrete task that is under study. Translation is just one case where you need to find some good functions to map sequences to other sequences. The "Attention Is All You Need" paper frames the problem and contribution as: "The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder…

You have no idea of the meaning of that word.

Re: Claude 3 beats Google Translate

#112

Post by hackmaxim »

clauderoux wrote: post #109

I read the article and I found it quite lacking. Why on Earth would you force your LLM to translate sentence by sentence? It ruins the whole interest of LLM, which is to use large contexts to drive your generation. I used Deepl a lot in the past and I had a recurrent problem when translating from French into English, computer related texts. In French, a "chaine" in the context of computer science is mostly translated…

I'm one of the authors on the paper. Actually, sentence-by-sentence translation is important in a machine translation system because in many cases users will only provide single sentences. We also test document-level translation in Section 5, and find large improvements (but it isn't the focus of our paper).

Re: Claude 3 beats Google Translate

#114

Post by sunaookami »

casey2 wrote: post #39
sunaookami wrote: post #4

DeepL already beat Google Translate years ago.

DeepL is also very bad, it ties with google in plenty of very basic sentences. Try out: 私は毎週本を読む。友達は漫画だ。 Meta's gets it despite a message claiming that it doesn't know non-English languages very well (which is true).

I didn't say that DeepL is better than LLMs only that DeepL is miles better than Google ;). And yeah, I also noticed DeepL sometimes misses some words when translating Japanese (it just ignores them). Google is so much worse though, because it translates Japanese through English (if the target language is not English). DeepL gets better when you have a lot of text.

Point is that Google Translate hasn't been #1 since DeepL launched. But now LLMs are (obviously) much better with the added bonus that they can also break down sentences for you.

Re: Claude 3 beats Google Translate

#115

Post by jampekka »

_giorgio_ wrote: post #111
jampekka wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research, especially in academia, isn't usually that interested in the single concrete task that is under study. Translation is just one case where you need to find some good functions to map sequences to other sequences. The "Attention Is All You Need" paper frames the problem and contribution as: "The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder…

You have no idea of the meaning of that word.

Which word?

Re: Claude 3 beats Google Translate

#116

Post by raxxorraxor »

oefrha wrote: post #52
maven29 wrote: post #18

People trust Google Translate to not go off-topic or "hallucinate" and there is still a lot of value in something semi-deterministic like that. (Edit: To clarify, maintaining semantics is held sacrosanct in classical methods of machine translation)

I think it was around 2018 when Google Translate translated Chinese 万 (ten thousand) to “million” for me, making the stats I was looking at completely nonsensical. I was shocked it managed be so wrong about something so basic. I wouldn’t call it trustworthy.

It does that regularly for any numeric values in other languages too, especially also those that use different decimal symbols than standard English.

You really have to check the numbers yourself.

Re: Claude 3 beats Google Translate

#117

Post by raxxorraxor »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #6

I still find it amazing how LLM translation capabilities are an almost accidental feature. Yet they still managed to leapfrog decades of research and billions of investment dollars in traditional machine translation.

The compute power needed for translations is vastly different though.

Re: Claude 3 beats Google Translate

#118

Post by [deleted] »

ben_w wrote: post #85
jsheard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't OpenAI still operating at a loss? You can't infer much from an API bring cheaper if it's being subsidised.

I've not heard any claim that they're making a loss, only that they're structured as a kinda-but-its-weird not-for-profit. Given they tripped and fell over a money printing machine and then chose to lower their API prices, it would be pretty surprising (but not impossible) if their API prices are currently subsidised.

[deleted]

Re: Claude 3 beats Google Translate

#119

Post by racional »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #53
spacebanana7 wrote: post #6

I still find it amazing how LLM translation capabilities are an almost accidental feature. Yet they still managed to leapfrog decades of research and billions of investment dollars in traditional machine translation.

And still, there are people saying that LLMs are useless. I find that even more amazing.

The charge generally made against LLMs is not that they're useless.

Rather that they are in many settings overhyped and overprescribed.

Re: Claude 3 beats Google Translate

#120

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

staticman2 wrote: post #108
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using metaphorical or allegorical language as a test isn't that useful. Getting something appropriate is going to be much more up to chance.

>>>Using metaphorical or allegorical language as a test isn't that useful. Because nobody wants to translate literature with metaphorical language?

Not the point. Even human readers are going to be unsure about what is meant, that means automatic translators are always going to do even worse and mere chance becomes prevalent.

If you look at how humans translate literature, the translator becomes a part of the work (in the new language) because translating it is an art, not a science. There is no 'correct' translation, only ones that deliver a human experience or interpretation of the original.

So as I said, it's less useful as a test.

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