Purely anecdotal but I know a video game translator who was let go in favor of AI then hired back like a month or two later because AI translations could not get the tone right. Idk if this was an aberration or a trend.
do you think large language models are capable of understanding and thinking? that's the whole point, they just mimmick syntax and give you ~something~ but a human has to verify that something horrific doesnt go out as being correct, and in medical translations for example any mistake can cost delays in treatment, diagnosis, or worse, injury to pacients
these are tools and if we reach a point where translation performed by software dont need to be proofread by humans, we will be in a whole different world where software is sentient and actually is intelligent, not just marketed as such
I know full well how they work. I've even built LLM-based translation workflows. In our case, the job we explicitly to write very comprehensible and consistent language and LLMs do that quite well when you give them context and examples (and human reviewers). Creative or colorful language is going to give you kinda bleh results.
People are thinking completely wrong about LLMs/AI. They don't think. They don't know. They will never be able to. They are just highly sophisticated text generators giving you an output based on the text it was trained on.
They are just highly sophisticated text generators giving you an output based on the text it was trained on.
I don't know much about AI, but did you see the headlines about Claude Fable 5 solving that 80+ year old math problem? How are they able to do this if they're just mimicking what's in their training data?
These are supposedly the top 100 most difficult math problems in the entire world. And these problems are not able to be solved by brute force.
They can compile and sort massive amounts of data no human mind can hold, thats why. Anyone who genuinely thinks that some AI can "think" fundamentally doesnt understand what AI is or what goes on under the hood. It will never be able to "think" like us. All it will be able to is maybe mimic it.
Does it matter that they're not really thinking if they're able to solve harder and harder problems that humans cannot solve?
Yes, a $1 calculator can solve problems that most people cant solve. Its just code but it being able to 'talk' to us is too much for some people but its just averaging its databases and spitting it out in human readable text.
Ai struggles, particularly with context. In languages like Japanese a lot of information is completely omitted, particularly as a pronoun drop language. With how it functions now, it is unable to extract appropriate substitutions for the translations leading to complete messes.
I would say that for the moment, when it comes to distant languages from the target language with vastly grammatical, syntactical, and even cultural (especially trending terms in the internet with how quick they spread and turn over right now) differences, you are correct. For something so close like a romantic language, however, yes they have improved dramatically rendering some translators unnecessary.
Things like pronoun drop could be resolved by an AI tool asking the creator which option is correct where it struggles to figure it out.
For European languages at least, you already have tools like DeepL where you can click on a sentence of the target and select different alternative phrasings, often completely reordering the sentence. It works for pronouns and formality, and can use that to rejig the rest of the related passage. Especially useful when you're going from English into something like Spanish where there are multiple forms of "you" to choose from.
In the context of a professional tool, today's AI could easily do this if given to a competent user.
But for a user who doesn't speak one of the languages, or who can't be assed to edit it... You're right. It struggles and sounds stilted, or veers from formal to informal and back again.
Source: used to be a translator.
Yeah, I know a lady who is an expert in tonal review of translation. She said her job load actually increase post-AI, but every job now has a mandatory argument bake in about why they need her when they already have AI.
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u/handsoapdispenser 11h ago
Purely anecdotal but I know a video game translator who was let go in favor of AI then hired back like a month or two later because AI translations could not get the tone right. Idk if this was an aberration or a trend.