Comment by pjc50
4 days ago
Oddly enough, my wife was recently involved in a project to translate historical crime novels from Norwegian; since all the available late 20th century Scandinavian crime novels have already been translated and turned into popular TV series, the plan was to go further back. Into the 1930s. The first cut was done with LLMs, but encountered the problem that (a) Norwegian itself has changed noticeably since then, in both major dialects, and (b) the machine translation deteriorated on large sections, resulting in entirely missing paragraphs and pages in a few places. Not to mention the usual translation issues (what police role does lensman map to?) and localisation (to what extent should the casual antisemitism be left in or removed?)
Translation is never a bijective process. It's never quite the same experience in translation as it is in the original, due to the cultural differences between reader and writer. Larger in this case because 1930s Norway is very different even from 2020s Norway.
Ultimately this was not a success due to marketing difficulties; it is very difficult to get a book noticed.
( https://www.amazon.co.uk/Iron-Chariot-Nordic-Crime-Library/d... )
Sorry if I was unclear, I didn't want to give the impression I think translations or even transcriptions in some cases is easy, or without problems, or not painstakingly time-consuming, it very much is.
I just think building a LLM from scratch is ever harder, with more potential problems that are harder to solve, more time-consuming and even more resource-intensive.
It would require an investment, but those will pay dividends later, as it becomes easier to train LLMs on/for Norwegian. If we need to translate everything to English we might as well just drop using Norwegian altogether. Practically everyone speaks English fluently already...
> as it becomes easier to train LLMs on/for Norwegian
Why would it be easier in the future? The advances we see with LLMs today require a huge amount of data, and it's getting hard getting the amount of data just using any language, I'm having a hard time seeing how it'd get easier for Norwegians to build their own LLM, unless they seriously start to ramp up how much Norwegian content they're putting out.
> If we need to translate everything to English we might as well just drop using Norwegian altogether. Practically everyone speaks English fluently already...
Yeah I mean with that black and white perspective you can pretty much do anything and it won't matter for anything :) I think for the rest of us, what we speak daily and what we rely on professionally, can differ, and that's OK. But maybe this is just my broken Swedish mind being so used to using English professionally but then conversing in Spanish outside of work daily, YMMV.
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> in both major dialects
Nynorsk and bokmål is not dialects but variants of written Norwegian.