Comment by direwolf20
1 month ago
Translation is something Large Language Models are inherently pretty good at, without controversy, even though the output still should be independently verified. It's a language task and they are language models.
1 month ago
Translation is something Large Language Models are inherently pretty good at, without controversy, even though the output still should be independently verified. It's a language task and they are language models.
Of course. Transformers were originally invented for Google Translate.
Are they good at translating scientific jargon specific to a niche within a field? I have no doubt LLMs are excellent at translating well-trodden patterns; I'm a bit suspicious otherwise..
In my experience of using it to translate ML work between English->Spanish|Galician, it seems to literally translate jargon too eagerly, to the point that I have to tell it to maintain specific terms in English to avoid it sounding too weird (for most modern ML jargon there really isn't a Spanish translation).
It seems to me that jargon would tend to be defined in one language and minimally adapted in other languages. So I’d not sure that would be much of a concern.
I would look at non-English research papers along with the English ones in my field and the more jargon and just plain numbers and equations there were, the more I could get out of it without much further translation.
for better or for worse, most specific scientific jargon is already going to be in english