What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

Post by ryao » Wed, Jun 18, 2025, 7:25 AM UTC

zzo38computer wrote: post #82

sudahtigabulan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could I get a latte today actually To me (non-American) the above sounds like sarcasm, not politeness. Adding "today" and/or "actually" could mean you've had it with their delays. I like to joke that Americans always seem to find ways to get offended by innocuous things, but in this case the joke is on me.

I would think that it depends on the context. To me it seems (without any context) that it might mean that you changed your mind about what day you wanted it. This does not seem to make sense in many contexts, though.

Post by amake » Wed, Jun 18, 2025, 7:28 AM UTC

few wrote: post #19

philsnow wrote: post #6

The distinction between what people typically imagine a translator's job is and the reality reminds me of pixar movies being "localized" instead of just translated (green beans on a plate in the Japan release instead of broccoli because that's the food that Japanese kids don't like). Lacking cultural context while reading translated texts is what made studying history finally interesting to me.

Another infamous example is Brock's "jelly filled donuts" in pokemon https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brocks-jelly-doughnuts

Post by jiehong » Wed, Jun 18, 2025, 7:42 AM UTC

tkgally wrote: post #5

> ... a translators’ and interpreters’ work is mostly about ensuring context, navigating ambiguity, and handling cultural sensitivity. This is what Google Translate cannot currently do. Google Translate can't, but LLMs given enough context can. I've been testing and experimenting with LLMs extensively for translation between Japanese and English for more than two years, and, when properly prompted, they are really go…

Post by camillomiller » Wed, Jun 18, 2025, 7:59 AM UTC

MarkusQ wrote: post #12

sodality2 wrote: post #11

This article is spot on about a lot of things. One thing I think it fails to address is this: > I feel confident in asserting that people who say this would not have hired a translator or learned Japanese in a world without Google Translate; they’d have either not gone to Japan at all, or gone anyway and been clueless foreigners as tourists are wont to do. The correlation here would be something like: the people usin…

Conversely, it may create jobs. Why? Because the more elephants you have in your parade, the more jobs there are for folks to walk behind them with a broom and bucket. For decades we've seen tools that "let users write their own software" and every one of them has driven up the demand for people to clean it up, make it scale, make it secure, or otherwise clean up the mess.

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 18, 2025, 8:34 AM UTC

ryao wrote: post #39

> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English) where a brit might say “Could I please have some potatoes?”. I find “I will have the potatoes” to be perfectly fine English and not haughty in the slightest. Is this a difference between British English and American English?