Comment by xigoi
3 days ago
> often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.
As one of such people, I think there is a nuance to it. AI is great when you’re translating something to yourself. But when translating things for others, more caution and human judgement is needed. Espesially when translating instruction manuals, where bad wording could cause someone to injure themself.
Exactly, it's never about absolute results, it's always
Expected Value (Upside, given time/cost savings + Downside, given %reliability).
So, every task falls under a spectrum
This. I put things through Google translate all the time and they're always unreliable. Sometimes they're correct, sometimes I need to know roughly what the original said. Infamously, Google used to say "geiler Typ" meant "horny guy" when it means "awesome guy". Google used to think "geil" meant "horny" in general, which it can but not usually
Google translate is primitive compared to Claude at translations.
Google Translate is at the bottom of the barrel. All other AI translation tools are vastly superior. You'd want to evaluate those, and forget about Google Translate completely.
It's all the same, except LLMs are less precise with names.
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Language is incredibly complex. I remember a TikTok from a bilingual English-Korean speaker comparing the English subtitles from a Squid Game scene to what was actually being said by the characters. The nuance and info density lost in translation made the subtitles feel completely remedial. Americans were basically watching a different show altogether.
I'm by no means a native level Japanese speaker but I'm frequently surprised at how off Japanese-English subtitles can be.
I was watching the Netflix show The Empress with Chinese subtitles that did a pretty good job translating the German. I switched to English subs for one episode and couldn't stop telling the people I was watching with "That's not what he said! That's completely different!"