Comment by kingkongjaffa

> (LLM model selection? scanned-PDF OCR? bilingual output? segment-level edits? glossary? missing format support?).

Yeah, none of that matters.

I've worked with professional document translators for years, and compared their translation services with Google translate and Deep L.

Translations are still quite bad with LLM's for niche or technical topics. There are borrowed words, words that only make sense to specific professions or used in the right context etc.

Most translations suffer from overly literal translations between the English word and the target language word or phrase. Sentence structure, grammar, word choice, and industry research to find the common terms a 'topic-native' person would understand are all still very hard for LLM's to get consistently correct (and are the things that good professional translators do well).

There's a chance for common topics that the general public would be familiar with, that LLM's can now translate well enough. For business or medical or technical writing it's still a bit varied in quality.