Comment by Swizec

3 days ago

> As far as I could tell, nothing was substantially different from the Ellsworth translation and the Fable translation.

Crucially the full translation was part of ChatGPT’s training set. Recall is a pretty solved problem in machine learning.

How well does it translate a French novel published yesterday? Where neither the original novel nor any translations are in the training set yet? Or might not even exist!

I tried asking ChatGPT to translate a letter I wrote in Slovenian this weekend. It got the general gist but missed a lot of the nuance. Completely missed several of the little touches of tone where the right choice of synonym conveys a whole bunch of information.

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Swizec

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tombert  3 days ago

Did no one actually finish reading my comment?

  • Swizec  3 days ago

    I feel like that wasn’t there when I started writing my comment. I also have a bad habit of quickly posting and then adding over a few minutes.

    Glad we agree :)

    • tombert  3 days ago

      Guess I have no way of proving it, but I pinky swear that I didn't edit it in later!

      But yeah, I broadly do agree; if I read other languages I could find a book that hadn't been thoroughly translated to English and then I could give a proper analysis on how good the translation is, but since I'm a very stereotypical American I know exactly one language (and sometimes my comprehension of even that is questionable).

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