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Comment by bugufu8f83 | Hacker News Reader

Your solution to "I would like to know how the original non-translated version is like." is to recommend translation software?

And the idea of disregarding professional translations in favor of LLMs for quality reasons is breathtakingly...something. Arrogant? Naive?

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To be fair to GP, while I agree that literary translations are still much better left to professional translators, the specific examples actually given have recently been moving in the opposite direction in my experience - at least for translations from English. In my own language, I've seen articles published in translation under license, on major local news sites, including mis-translations as ridiculous as "1000 lb bombs" translated as "1000 £ bombs" ("bombe de 1000 de lire").

News sites are extremely cash strapped, I bet it's all automatic translation, maybe with the exception of a few important articles, and it has been even before LLMs.

On my local news sites I still see crap like english word order but Romanian words on filler articles, which means it wasn't even a LLM.

During the Ukraine war I saw many Russian or Ukrainian language articles or whatever translated with just Google Translate and it was a hopeless jumble of errors.

Even GPT 4 was massively better.

Some people just don’t understand how general purpose these chat bots are and insist on continuing to use single purpose tools that have been left in the dust.

Dude, you should know on here the answer the every question, including the meaning of life, these days is AI.

If you want a verbatim translation of a piece of foreign language text where your problem is specifically that human authors are editorialising their translations… then yes, AI is the solution.

“You always want to use the backhoe!”, says the person with a giant hole they need excavated quickly and cheaply.

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