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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)
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I’m curious do you have a reproducible example of this?
I don't have one with an accent right now, but something similar: it refuse to translate from french to english "plaid", but it work with "un plaid", which in this case correctly translate to "a blanket". Edit: I found one with accent, both translation are wrong but one more incorrect than the other: "avoir la chiasse aigue" from french to english. it means "having acute diarrhea". Without the accent, gtranslate tran…
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You think this: "Swarming like a swarm of bees. He was carried among the people, hanging from the handle. No matter how good you think about the situation you're in, it's disgusting. Where are you now?" is a comparable translation to this: "No matter how you couch it, riding the subway feels disgusting: you dangle like ripe fruit from a hanging vine, squeezed in among humans swarming like bees." Or this ?: "Being cra…
I do think those are comparable. Could be better, but it communicates the key concepts and emotional tone?
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.
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.
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)
But Google Translate doesn't do that. It often translates things very literally.
As an example, it translates "You should step in when a conversation goes south." into Romanian with the literal words "heading towards south" which is not an expression in Romanian. It's very confusing. ChatGPT translates it as "goes down the wrong road", which is an expression that makes sense.
Im surprised they didn’t try out Gemini. It’s a lot better than Google translate and in my experience this is one use case where Gemini outshines even other frontier models like ChatGPT4
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The original Transformer, indeed for translation, was an encoder-decoder architecture. Most current LLMs, like Claude 3, are "decoder only". So in a sense the decoder-only translation is kinda accidental feature too.
So anything except encoder decoder translation is accidental? Crazy way to define research.
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-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely."
Translation is "just an experiment" for the general architecture and they study other tasks in the paper too.
In a sense, all applications of basic research are "accidental".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have one with an accent right now, but something similar: it refuse to translate from french to english "plaid", but it work with "un plaid", which in this case correctly translate to "a blanket". Edit: I found one with accent, both translation are wrong but one more incorrect than the other: "avoir la chiasse aigue" from french to english. it means "having acute diarrhea". Without the accent, gtranslate tran…
Well you’re highlighting the whole premise of Google Translate with your example. It requires context. It’s not confident enough to translate a word coming from English, that seems to be used very little outside France, and probably not that common in the sources of Google Translate. So you need to give it a context by adding an article.
> (GT:) Ten years after Yongzheng's reign, the platform experienced many turmoils, but there was never any attempt to mobilize troops to suppress the troops.
> (Claude:) After the tenth year of the Yongzheng reign, although there were frequent disturbances in Taiwan, there were no instances of dispatching troops to suppress the harm caused by the indigenous people, indicating their weakened state
(note GT's mistranslation of 臺地 (Taiwan) as 'platform', and the crucial chronological difference between 'After the tenth year of the Yongzheng reign' (correct translation of 雍正十年以後) and 'Ten years after Yongzheng's reign' (incorrect))
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> (GT:) Since the establishment of trade in the Western Kingdom, his ships have often traveled behind mountains and landed on reefs in the wind. Many people have seen that their appearance and clothing are different, and they cannot understand the language, so their lives may not be saved. In the future, provocations may inevitably arise from various sources! Why conquer it?
> (Claude:) Since the opening of trade with Western countries, their ships often sailed behind the mountains. If they encountered storms or reefs and landed, the indigenous people, upon seeing their strange appearance and clothing and being unable to communicate with them, might not spare their lives. Future border conflicts may inevitably begin with these indigenous tribes! How can we deal with this?
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> (GT:) In the sixth year of Tongzhi's reign, an American Roman merchant ship was caught in a storm and ran aground at Guizaijiao, south of Langqiao, under the jurisdiction of Fengshan County.
> (Claude:) In the sixth year of the Tongzhi reign (1867), an American merchant ship, the Rover, encountered a storm and ran aground on Guizai Cape south of Langqiao, Fengshan County, breaking the ship. The captain and several sailors swam ashore but were killed by the indigenous people, who also injured a military officer
(note how GT simply silently dropped a whole sentence (船主與數水手鳧水近岸，被番所殺，續又傷其兵官一人) about what happened to the the captain & sailors!)
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> (GT:) In the spring of the seventh year, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang wrote to the governor of Fujian, saying that although Shengfan was not legally bound, the land belonged to China.
> (Claude:) In the spring of the seventh year (1868), Prince Gong, the Minister in charge of foreign affairs, sent a letter to the Governor of Fujian, stating that although the indigenous people could not be restrained by law, their land still belonged to China
[1] https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&chapter=149754#:~:text=%E4%B...
Direct link to Google Translate version: https://tinyurl.com/6juv4nkd (what you see may differ slightly from mine)