Hacker News Reader

Comment by Maxion | Hacker News Reader

> AI-translated phrase at the bottom. I'd love to know the mind of the forger. They did put some serious work into the invoice but then AI-translated an idiomatic American phrase (wrongly!) which wouldn’t by used on a German invoice.

This is especially stupid because LLMs like ChatGPT CAN output phrases that wouldn't be out of tune. I assume the forger got that phrase by literally asking the LLM to translate an english phrase to german, rather than asking the LLM what would be a good german phrase to use.

View on HN

> literally asking the LLM to translate an english phrase to german

I tried it a few times on arena.lmsys.org and given the prompt "Please translate "We thank you for your business" into German", the most common result was "Wir danken Ihnen für Ihr Geschäft", I got one bad result from some random tiny model and some more extensive responses from Gemini with suggestions for more idiomatic expressions. Modern LLMs are typically smart enough to understand this nuance when translating to German.

That’s an interesting result. I’ve re-run your prompt with one change (made it “translate idiomatically” instead) to guide models towards a more natively German mode of expression and a few actually came back with a more appropriate phrase than that literal translation.

Would you’d like to share? The most analogue I can come up with would be ”Danke für Ihren Einkauf” – but that wouldn't be printed on an invoice. The only place where I can see such a sentence would be on thermoprinted receipts from POS, those small boilerplate nobody reads.

That’s my point: You can make a semantically and possible idiomatic translation but it would be still _culturally_ wrong to use it in this context.

Or he didn't use a LLM at all, they were translation programs before ChatGPT

LLMs are based on the model architecture for Google Translate, so it's not a whole lot different. Of course they're much more "intelligent".

But we don't know what site was used for the translation.

There is more than ChatGPT and Google Translate

Reply on news.ycombinator.com