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   Eugen Rochko (gargron@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 05:57:17 JST Eugen Rochko

   • かき@GNUsocialJP

   Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.

   • Steve's Place and Baylee :ms_asexual_flag:♠️ repeated this.
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     Eugen Rochko (gargron@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 06:01:04 JST Eugen Rochko

     in reply to

     • かき@GNUsocialJP

     I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.

     Rich Felker, fanta 🐌 and 川音리오＠かわねすきー repeated this.
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     Almotacén de carrera (pozuelen@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 06:02:31 JST Almotacén de carrera

     in reply to

     @Gargron totalmente de acuerdo, compañero.

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     Michael Cook (foobarsoft@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 06:15:55 JST Michael Cook

     in reply to

     @Gargron Native speaker: I think you’re right. Though I have seen warnings recently about “new translation” editions on Amazon that are just LLM trash.

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     ⏩︎VOTE⏪︎ ᶜʸⁿⁱᶜⁱˢᵐ⁼ᵃᶜᶜᵉᵖᵗᵃⁿᶜᵉ (Ben Royce) (benroyce@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 06:32:07 JST ⏩︎VOTE⏪︎ ᶜʸⁿⁱᶜⁱˢᵐ⁼ᵃᶜᶜᵉᵖᵗᵃⁿᶜᵉ (Ben Royce)

     in reply to

     @Gargron

     on the plus side, machine translation illuminated me as to the involvement of the presbyterian church in the famous movie "backstroke of the west"

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Episode_III_%E2%80%93_Revenge_of_the_Sith#Backstroke_of_the_West

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     The Penguin of Evil (etchedpixels@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 06:33:46 JST The Penguin of Evil

     in reply to

     @Gargron In addition a lot of anglophone people speak only one language, so they've never been able to compare the translation of a book between two languages they speak.

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     Mr. Lance E Sloan (IRL) 👤 (sloanlance@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 07:20:15 JST Mr. Lance E Sloan (IRL) 👤

     in reply to

     @Gargron
     For many years, YouTube has been filled with tragic machine-translated captions, even before the new AI trend of the past few years. Not only machine translated ones, but also machine generated ones converted from spoken words.

     The problem with any machine translations or generated captions is that people aren't proofreading them. Viewers get garbage and the machines didn't get proper feedback.

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     HowToPhil (Phillip R) (howtophil@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 07:22:21 JST HowToPhil (Phillip R)

     in reply to

     @Gargron This.

   • Embed this notice
     Stefan Scholl (stefan_s_from_h@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 07:23:32 JST Stefan Scholl

     in reply to

     @Gargron Yes, the German version of Lord of the Rings has different translators. When I tried reading it as a kid, I felt so lost. It was boring as hell.

     Decades later I heard that the first translation is considered a bad one.

   • Embed this notice
     Eugen Rochko (gargron@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 07:25:35 JST Eugen Rochko

     in reply to

     • かき@GNUsocialJP

     From what I've observed, people who claim that LLMs can replace artists don't understand art, people who claim that they can replace musicians don't understand music, people who claim that they can replace writers don't understand literature, and people who claim they can replace translators don't rely on translations. If I had a button that would erase LLMs from the world but it would take machine translations away (which is a false dichotomy anyway), I would absolutely still press it.

     Rich Felker, Warner Crocker and Thomas 🔭🕹️ repeated this.
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     James 🦉 #FBPE 🇪🇺 (freequaybuoy@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 07:32:48 JST James 🦉 #FBPE 🇪🇺

     in reply to

     @Gargron Just before LLMs burst onto the scene, not long after my Creative Writing MA, a friend's partner told me about them and how they could, "write a novel as well a human." I think he expected me to be shocked or horrified by this, but as a student of literature and writing, I was far more astonished that apparently someone had come up with a way to determine the final analysis of a text! A Computer Science analogy, might be someone telling you they'd found a solution to the Halting Problem

   • Embed this notice
     Eugen Rochko (gargron@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 07:32:56 JST Eugen Rochko

     in reply to

     • かき@GNUsocialJP

     Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.

   • Embed this notice
     DJGummikuh (djgummikuh@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 07:32:56 JST DJGummikuh

     in reply to

     @Gargron while all your examples are 100% valid, I seriously question whether we would be able to manage to do that today. With the utter shambles most democracies are in currently, multi-national Corporations can run roughshod on environmental protection, worker safety, child protection and just about everything that past generations fought hard for.

   • Embed this notice
     Jeff Grigg (jeffgrigg@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 07:39:31 JST Jeff Grigg

     in reply to

     @Gargron

     My experience has been that LLM translations are almost good enough to verify that a message is a scam.

   • Embed this notice
     Offbeatmammal (offbeatmammal@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 07:41:29 JST Offbeatmammal

     in reply to

     @Gargron i haven't actually used French in almost 30 years, but still get annoyed watching movies where the subtitles are wrong. I have been known to pause, check a translation, curse at whoever did the captions for missing subtleties (in their subtitles), and the hit play again!

   • Embed this notice
     Domingos Faria (df@s.dfaria.eu)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 07:51:48 JST Domingos Faria

     in reply to

     @Gargron It is a technology that humanity has been seeking for a long time. At least since the 1950s, with Turing and his colleagues.

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     Sarcasm is all I have Left (happytobe@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 08:07:26 JST Sarcasm is all I have Left

     in reply to

     @Gargron You sound like me arguing against the inevitability of mass use of the cell phone.

     I never understood why we gave up crystal clear audio, a two way simultaneous connection (yes, both parties could talk at the same time and hear wha5 the other had to say), and phone books for unintelligible garbled speak, dropped calls, delays, and no way to look up the damn phone number.

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     slash (agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 08:30:25 JST slash

     in reply to

     @Gargron This was even true in the 1600s, when the Companies of (human) Translators were translating the Bible into English (the so-called "King James" version, 1611).

     Translations of human language require the ability to translate the _sense_ of some local or regional usage into something similar in the target language.

     They include a footnote indicating that one passage was essentially untranslatable, because the phrase was not understood by anyone. So they used context instead.

   • Embed this notice
     Kerry Mitchell 🍁 (kerrymitchell@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 08:30:39 JST Kerry Mitchell 🍁

     in reply to

     @Gargron It's hard to put the brakes on advances, like the Ghost Shirt Society finds out at the end of Vonnegut's Player Piano.

     I heard an interview with a professor yesterday who wrote a book on the benefits of keeping cash alive and not relying completely on digital payment systems. He suggested using cash at least once a week. Maybe people will be able to do that with AI - limit their use and rely on their own brains at least some of the time. https://blogs.bu.edu/zagorsky/

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     vy (vy@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 08:53:02 JST vy

     in reply to

     @Gargron there is a great essay on translation by Simon Leys

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 10:15:58 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @Gargron The problem is that the pieces of shit peddling LLMs have convinced the political class that it's a race to technological supremacy and that any nation that bans them will be left behind. When in reality they're more like opium.

   • Embed this notice
     GeePawHill (geepawhill@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 11:07:50 JST GeePawHill

     in reply to

     @Gargron In English, the angel and demon of Russian literature is Constance Garnett, who translated much of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky.

     Angel, cuz she was one of the earliest sources of English translation.

     Demon, cuz she manages to make Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky sound like the same writer.

     Nabokov's Pushkin translation is an exercise in erudition. Half of every page is his translated quatrain. The other half, sometimes even more, is his footnotes about his choices & alternates.

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     mspong (mspong@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 11:23:42 JST mspong

     in reply to

     @Gargron When they say LLMs can replace artists what they mean is, "We have enough art now. The sum total of art we have is sufficient. Remixing and blending the corpus of art will be good enough forever. If not we can just tap some humans afflicted with the artist disease to generate some more, and it will be cheaper! They'll do it for free! Fools."

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     Phil Spectrum (philspectrum@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 16:12:49 JST Phil Spectrum

     in reply to

     @Gargron this!! 👆 👆 👆 👆

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     Elric (elricofmelnibone@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 17:01:46 JST Elric

     in reply to

     @Gargron Much like lead, it makes people dumber. Which might be what certain people want.

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     NoBorg (hadon@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 18:55:42 JST NoBorg

     in reply to

     @Gargron
     Totally agree!

     Even normal translations (by human translators) sometimes lose meaning nuances in the translation. In literature, it's always better to read the original version ( if you can).

     Now when it comes to Mastodon, I totally love it! Being able to get a rough idea of what people all over Europe think about an issue, is soooo helpful! Being able to exchange with them is priceless!

   • Embed this notice
     Wilfried Klaebe (wonka@chaos.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 21:32:04 JST Wilfried Klaebe

     in reply to

     • Claudio C

     @cktodon I've seen a work of Terry Pratchett "translated" (by a human though) from British English to US English. To even have the idea this could be useful enrages me.

   • Embed this notice
     Claudio C (cktodon@mas.to)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 21:32:05 JST Claudio C

     in reply to

     @Gargron @mastodon.social I absolutely agree.
     On the other hand, although I'm a native spanish speaker, I've read a couple of books in english.
     I think that US pleople don't even consider reading in any language but english.

     川音리오＠かわねすきー likes this.
     川音리오＠かわねすきー repeated this.
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     Stephen Dioxide :TwinPines: (steve@social.coop)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 21:36:03 JST Stephen Dioxide :TwinPines:

     in reply to

     @Gargron As someone who translates into English, I appreciate you saying this.

     It's true there's a lot of very good literature in English, but I'm pretty convinced that the majority of anglophones don't know what they're missing by not reading translated books.

     川音리오＠かわねすきー likes this.
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     Curioso 🍉 🇺🇦 (jgg) (jgg@qoto.org)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 21:50:11 JST Curioso 🍉 🇺🇦 (jgg)

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @cstross @Gargron

     I feel pretty dumb telling this to the master, but translating a literary work is much more than changing one word for another. Even it you keep all the meaning, it gets weird and doesn't flow; each language has its own rhythm and cadence. A good translator frequently has to completely rewrite a paragraph to keep the sense, the emotions and the flow of the story. Even worse, he needs to make it faithful to the original, which having intermediate versions can make harder.

     I'm not a professional translator, but I have tried to translate some public domain stories, and found that automatic translation is a hindrance. I had to rewrite nearly all, looking always to the original version. It was too easy to drift far from it and get the text and the author absolutely distorted.

     It is a work of art and love, not something a machine can do at all. Not even a part of it.

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     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Mar-2026 21:50:13 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     @Gargron I'm willing to guess that machine translation of prose may serve two uses: firstly, as an assist for human translators (by preparing a very rough first cut, which they then have to refine), and secondly, as an assist for human editors in figuring out which foreign-language-works to pay a human translator (with or without AI assistance) to work on (translation costs money: knowing where to spend it is important). But those are assistive roles, not human-replacing ones.

     川音리오＠かわねすきー repeated this.
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     Romeu Moura (romeu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Mar-2026 04:01:47 JST Romeu Moura

     in reply to

     @Gargron the other day I was commenting that on a debate between a lawyer and a non-lawyer dude to that 100% believed, in a very arrogant manner, that LLMs could soon replace 100% of any and all lawyers at all skill levels once, and I quote, « we use AI to make laws so precise that every result can be calculated »

     I was awed at the levels of ignorance of what is even law.

     LLM lovers yearn for levels of oppression never seen. With a smooth brainess never beaten.