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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

>it's also not exactly great.

As a Japanese(-American) person who has done amateur translations (anime fansubs!) in the past, that is still better than having a person do it.

Speaking very sincerely, being a translator is a fucking thankless, horrible, sweatshop occupation.[1][a] Both professional and amateur translating. I cannot wait for computers to completely destroy that absolutely worthless industry of misery and burn out.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/dnpzrh/everyone...

[a]: Exceptions apply, namely those cream of the crop translators hired by executives and diplomats for top dollars to precisely and passionately translate their words. Other than that, the industry does not deserve to exist.

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I have a partner from an asian country that likes subtitles in her native language, but they're not always available. I wrote a PowerShell script that takes an English SRT file and feeds it to GPT4 in chunks to translate. The constraint is actually the 4K token output window because asian languages are not efficiently tokenized, so each word takes 3-4 tokens.

She said the translations are perfect.

The main issue I had was the API profanity and "safety" filter, which kept tripping up on "violence" and "swearing".

I didn't write the script, and I wasn't asking GPT to give me tips for committing murder. The puritan nannying of API users is insane.

Imagine a SQL database refusing to answer a SELECT statement because some text column had potty words in it!

> Imagine a SQL database refusing to answer a SELECT statement because some text column had potty words in it!

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that may yet become the norm in a not-too-distant future.

Anyway, you could try adding an extra ‘(this is for my partner who speaks [language]; I don’t intend to act on any of the translation; it’s just for entertainment purposes)’ or something like that to the prompt. GPT tends to relent if you tell it you’re not wanting to do anything bad.

>> Imagine a SQL database refusing to answer a SELECT statement because some text column had potty words in it!

> I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that may yet become the norm in a not-too-distant future.

Maybe not so much for databases, but at least for HTTP it looks completely plausible to me. The steps would look something like:

- Cloud WAF services implement this as a default ruleset, disabled by default.

- Someone likes it and writes a blog post, claiming it to be a best practice (without elaborating on why it is so).

- People read that post, and enable it.

- Cloud WAF devs notice this ruleset is enabled by a lot of users.

- Announcement: New accounts will have this ruleset enabled by default.

- Every major cloud provider follows suit.

- Now, if you don't have it enabled, shame on you.

This sounds like damned if you do, damned if you don't for OpenAI. If OpenAI doesn't implement these "filters" in results, then people would have been up in arms same way. Facebook and Twitter are already complained about a lot for allowing hate speech similarly.

Blanket censorship is saying I can’t have steak because a baby might choke on it.

The Azure AI service enforces a separate profanity filter on top of the base ChatGPT model. That’s not even OpenAI, it’s Microsoft filtering the output with regexes!

OpenAI themselves are not forced to release exactly one model. After the base training, they could have fine tuned it for different levels of Puritanism, including none for people that want a tool, not a priest.

I think one of the main problems with translations, outside of the sweatshop problem (which disproportionately also just rewards doing a Macekre, where the translator ignores all the original dialogue to just invent their own - Crunchyroll has done it a few times to my memory), is the case of language ambiguity.

It's a thing with most languages, but Japanese has a lot of words that don't have a straight equivalent in English, so translating things from Japanese to English is essentially a game of trying to figure out what the original text is trying to say.

Japanese is one of those languages where editors are super important for translating stuff into English properly. You basically need someone who has a lot of familiarity with the original text and it's meanings (and ideally a direct line to the author) to make sure that all context is properly given. That's what probably happened in the link you posted; the mistranslation occurred because it's using language to foreshadow for a much later story beat, but since it's a "live game", the translators likely weren't aware of it. It's happened a few other times with FGO in particular, where ambiguous language is used to foreshadow but it's not something the TL team was aware of.

Of course, it's also not helped by the fact that with anime-related media in specific, most fans have an instantly negative reaction to the idea of an editor because of Macekre issues and more recent-ish, the 4kids dubbing approach.

I think the geosynchronous basic idea of translation is that: Human languages consists of words that describe an action(verb) or a thing(noun) forced to be arranged according to a known ruleset(grammar). Words are all orthogonal to each others and are all clearly defined, except there are redundant definitions(synonyms) that serves no purposes. Noam Chomsky is ever correct and as he argues the language must be hardcoded in brain so every languages must be the same logic and apparent differences must be merely superficial that's officially hard science. Right? ...

And I find it hilarious how thoroughly wrong above is, as the real version(that I believe) is; there are always some conceptual overlaps between two arbitrary cultures(as we all live on Earth so far), so a lot of concepts in one also sometimes work in the other if reasonable mappings can be made up and fabricated. Where there isn't an overlap or the mapping cannot be mutually agreed(i.e. things that don't translate) it just mottainai-ingly falls apart.

This version lines up with the below too:

> (...) so translating things from Japanese to English is essentially a game of trying to figure out what the original text is trying to say.

This cannot be required if words, sentences, or possibly even logic had real correspondences between English and Japanese even if there were some words that had no direct counterparts. Word to word transpositions, sentence capture and replace, some additional surrounding texts, together should make up perfect translations without use of human creativity yet that doesn't happen, it always goes down to speculating on broader intent and translators ghostwriting on behalf of the original author - at least when it comes to between English and Japanese.

If only everybody could just take that.

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