Comment by gus_massa
18 hours ago
Autotranslating technical texts is very hard. After the translation, you muct check that all the technical words were translated correctly, instead of a fancy synonym that does not make sense.
(A friend has an old book translated a long time ago (by a human) from Russian to Spanish. Instead of "complex numbers", the book calls them "complicated numbers". :) )
The convenient thing in this case (verification of translation of academic papers from the speaker's native language to English) is that the authors of the paper likely already 1. can read English to some degree, and 2. are highly likely to be familiar specifically with the jargon terms of their field in both their own language and in English.
This is because, even in countries with a different primary spoken language, many academic subjects, especially at a graduate level (masters/PhD programs — i.e. when publishing starts to matter), are still taught at universities at least partly in English. The best textbooks are usually written in English (with acceptably-faithful translations of these texts being rarer than you'd think); all the seminal papers one might reference are likely to be in English; etc. For many programs, the ability to read English to some degree is a requirement for attendance.
And yet these same programs are also likely to provide lectures (and TA assistance) in the country's own native language, with the native-language versions of the jargon terms used. And any collaborative work is likely to also occur in the native language. So attendees of such programs end up exposed to both the native-language and English-language terms within their field.
This means that academics in these places often have very little trouble in verifying the fidelity of translation of the jargon in their papers. It's usually all the other stuff in the translation that they aren't sure is correct. But this can be cheaply verified by handing the paper to any fluently-multilingual non-academic and asking them to check the translation, with the instruction to just ignore the jargon terms because they were already verified.
> with the native-language versions of the jargon terms used
It depends on the country. Here in Argentina we use a lot of loaned words for technical terms, but I think in Spain they like to translate everything.
When reading technical material in my native language, I sometimes need to translate it back to English to fully understand it.
I remember one time when I had written a bunch of user facing text for an imaging app and was reviewing our French translation. I don't speak French but I was pretty sure "plane" (as in geometry) shouldn't be translated as "avion". And this was human translated!
You'd be surprised how shoddy human translations can be, and it's not necessarily because of the translators themselves.
Typically what happens is that translators are given an Excel sheet with the original text in a column, and the translated text must be put into the next column. Because there's no context, it's not necessarily clear to the translator whether the translation for plane should be avion (airplane) or plan (geometric plane). The translator might not ever see the actual software with their translated text.
idk I think Gemini 2.5 did a great job at almost all research math papers translating from french to english...