Comment by vore
2 years ago
I don't think they're arguing that an LLM is better at translation that an actual translator, just that they are pretty good at it. DeepL and Google Translate definitely also make things up though, so I don't think that's a good comparison...
> DeepL and Google Translate definitely also make things up
I think what they make up is different, but this is a good point. They have a particularly odd tendency to either do something like autocorrect where it wasn't appropriate (translate a different word that is similar in spelling to the requested word), or to make up false friends, doing something like transliterate + then autocorrect in the target language.
One example, which I blogged about 5 years ago but is still mistranslated, is the word "ribbit" (what a frog does): https://www.kmjn.org/notes/google_translates_ribbit.html
In 2018, if you translated it to Greek with Google Translate, it gave you κουνέλι (kouneli), which is Greek for rabbit. A word that is one letter away from ribbit but not close to a similar meaning. When I tried it just now, it translates it to ραβδί (rabdi), which means stick and is completely unrelated to the correct answer, but I guess starts with similar letters as ribbit?
Google search has a horrible tendency to do the same thing to my search terms. Autocorrect is (usually) great when typing on a touch screen but it's horrible when it decides it knows what I mean better than I do.