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

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

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 61 posts

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

#21

Post by simonebrunozzi »

I agree with Antirez on the fear: I call this the "Google Maps effect", the more you use Google Maps, the less you learn about city streets, etc.

By the way, I am Italian too; I lived in the US (SF) for ~10 years, and I speak (I think) a pretty good English.

More than 20 years ago I wrote a novel, Nonovvio, in Italian. A couple of months ago I decided to translate it to English, using GPT-4.

Here you can find both the (original) Italian version, and the one created with GPT-4. [0].

I don't think the novel is amazing nor a work of art; however, what I find interesting is how prescient I was on a number of things that happened after I finished writing it in the early 2000s.

[0]: https://github.com/simonebrunozzi/Nonovvio

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

#23

Post by turminal »

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 :(

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

#24

Post by jacobolus »

antirez wrote: post #4
e12e wrote: post #3

The 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.

Personally I find your ordinary English writing more fluent seeming, and the LLM version seems more like a foreign speaker doing somewhat awkward, choppy, mildly ungrammatical line-by-line translation.

That might be confirmation bias though.

Neither of them is a dazzling gem of English prose style, but both of them seem more than fine as effective communication from a non-native speaker/writer. I certainly couldn't do any better writing in a second language. So I say write with whichever process brings you more joy or seems more convenient.

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

#28

Post by ChatGTP »

golergka wrote: post #9

> And fear about the potential AI has to make everybody lazy, no longer willing to do things as hard as learning a new language. GPT-4 is also an invaluable help in learning a new language. You can use it as a tutor, explore topics you don't understand well enough, ask it to write texts tailored exactly for your level and vocabulary.

Student should never assess a teacher.

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

#30

Post by jiggawatts »

kromem wrote: post #7

> It shocks me that I can hear my voice when reading the translation. For me, this phenomenon with Copilot and a decade old codebase where I was the only contributor was unlike anything I'd experienced. It's one thing to see other people's thoughts reshaped by AI, but when it's your own thinking it's a very eerie feeling. Maybe only happens 10-15% of the time, but when it does it's uncanny.

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.
Post reply on HN