Comment by thrance
6 months ago
Do you speak more than one language? Because claiming "AI translates better than human" is ludicrous. Anyone with a modicum of experience on browsing the internet can immediately tell when a page was auto-translated, based on how awkward or outright nonsensical some of the text can be.
Also, I doubt other translators work by localizing <p> elements one by one, without context. The entire HTML is localized, semantic and all. I fail to see how translating JSX instead of HTML can improve the situation much.
1. I do speak more than one language. I agree with your point that perfect localization requires seeing a <p> element in the broader context of the parent component, parent page, the product, the industry, the audience and their expected level of tech savviness, the culture, and eventually preferences regarding tone of voice.
Typically, a human would need to be educated about these aspects to translate perfectly. In the future, in my opinion, humans will be educating—or configuring—the AI to do that.
The "localization compiler", which we've built to solve our own problem in the first place, is just a handy bunch of scripts aimed to help extract needed contextual hints that would then be passed on to the [preconfigured] LLM for translation, and it should go beyond just the names of the tags.
FWIW, by saying AI translations I don't mean Google Translate or machine translation tech that browsers come with. I mean actual foundational AI models that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral and others are developing.
The difference is significant, and there's no worse thing than half-assed robotic translation produced by an MT.
2. Regarding "AI translates better than humans." I think some commenters have already mentioned this, but the point is that outsourced translations can be worse than what LLMs can produce today, because when translations are outsourced, nobody seems to care about educating the native speaker about the product and the UI. And localizing the UI, which consists of thousands of chunks of text, is nontrivial for a human. On the flip side, a correctly configured LLM, when provided with enough relevant contextual tips, shows outstanding results.