Comment by gus_massa
2 days ago
As a not native speaker, for me using something like Google Translate is fine, it's literal enough to keep the author voice. [1]
Also writing a draft in Google Docs and accepting most [2] of the corrections is fine. The browser fix the orthography, but I 30% of the time forget to add the s to the verbs. For preposition, I roll a D20 and hope the best.
I'm not sure if these are expert systems, LLM, or pingeonware.
But I don't like when someone use a a LLM to rewrite the draft to make it more professional. It kills the personality of the author and may hallucinate details. It's also difficult to know how much of the post is written was the author and how much autocompleted by the AI:
[1] Remember to check that the technical terms are correctly translated. It used to be bad, but it's quite good now.
[2] most, not all. Sometimes the corrections are wrong.
> As a not native speaker, for me using something like Google Translate is fine, it's literal enough to keep the author voice
Strong disagree on author voice. Vomit blows.
I think better to let recipient use full-text translation if that is necessary.
OK, I have to agree. about author voice. Last year I wrote something in English and I used the autotranlation to make the Spanish version. Google translated it to es-es instead of es-ar. I had to go over it like 3 or 4 times to fix all the differences, and adjust the tone to a more informal one and select which technical words to keep unstranlated, and a few more details.
Anyway, the autotranlation saved a lot of time for the most common words and switching the noun-adjetive order.
>For preposition, I roll a D20 and hope the best.
This makes me think of something: are nonnative English speakers tempted to use LLMs to correct grammar because mistakes like this actually make the writing unintelligible in their native language? For example, if I swap out the "For" in this sentence for any (?) other preposition, it's still comprehensible. (At|Of|In|By|To|On|With) example, ...
> (At|Of|In|By|To|On|With) example, ...
All of them are comprehensible, but are wrong, nobody would use them. If a foreigner use them (the translated version) people will understand them, but it will sound odd. Depending on the context, people will correct it or just go on.
Perhaps "As" or "Like" are better, still not 100% accurate but almost.
Yeah, I didn't mean they weren't wrong or aren't odd, just that they'll be understood. My point was around the fact that I've been told before by people that certain errors in their native language that seem relatively small to me actually make it impossible to understand. So I wondered if the urge to use LLMs could be explained by a difference in expectation around the seriousness of errors.
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