Was that a double entendre or not? If not, you might make a literal translation to get the meaning across. If so, then a literal translation will not get the message across. Vice versa, if it was not a double entendre but you translate it as one, you may confuse the message and if it was and you translate it as such, then the human connection can be maintained.
That is also the tricky bit where you cross from being proficient in the language (say B1-B2) to fluent (C1-C2), you start knowing these double meanings and nuance and can pick up on them. You can also pick up on them when they weren't intended and make a rejoinder (that may flop or land depending on your own skill).
If you are constantly translating with a machine, you won't really learn the language. You have to step away at some point. AI translations present that in full: a translated text with a removed voice; the voice of AI is all of us and that sounds like none of us.
Pacta sunt servanda can be a real bitch sometimes.
For a indie videogame i work on, we tried a couple translation agencies, and they gave terrible output. At the end, we built our own LLM based agentic translation, with lots of customization for our specific project like building a prompt based on where the menu/string is at, shared glossary, and other features. Testing this against the agencies, it was better because we could customize it for the needs of our specific game.
Even then, at the end of the day, we went with freelancers for some of the languages as we couldn't really validate the AI output on those languages.The freelancers took a month to do the translation vs the 2-3 days we ourselves took for the languages we knew and we could monitor the AI output. But they did a nice job, much better than the agencies.
I feel that what AI really completely kills is those translation services. Its not hard at all to build or customize your own AI system, so if the agency is going to charge you considerable money for AI output, just do it yourself and get a better result. Meanwhile those freelancers are still in demand as they can actually check the project and understand it for a nice translation, unlike the mechanical agencies where you send them the excel and they send it to who knows what or an AI without you being able to check.
I will likely be opensourcing this customizable AI translation system for my project soon.
Now it's a classic, you need an expert in order to check the work of the machine, because the "customer" is by definition not able to do it.
Aside from highly technical domain, in purely literary works, I think that the translator is a co-author - maybe IP laws acknowledges that already? I remember the translation of E.A. Poe by C. Baudelaire for instance; I think you could feel Baudelaire's style because it is a lot "warmer" than Poe's. I've also read a translation of a Japanese novel and I was quite disappointed with it. I don't know Japanese but I have read/watched quite a few mangas/animes, so I could sense the speech patterns behind the translations and sometimes thought they could have made better choices.
In any case, one will still need a translator who is good at "prompt engineering" to get a quality translation. I don't know. Maybe translators can add this skill to their CV, so they can propose quick-and-dirty/cheap translations, or no-AI high quality translations.
Some suggest "no-AI" labels on cultural products already - I think if it becomes a reality it will probably act as "quality signaling", because it is becoming more difficult every year to tell the difference between AI and human productions. It won't matter if what you read was written by an AI or a human (if it quacks and looks like a duck...), but what the customer will probably want is to avoid poorly-prompted machine translation.
Note that this only applies to something like a translation where there's some notion of a "correct answer". For other cultural products it's irrelevant (as you say, if it quacks like a duck ...).
Quality signaling is really only necessary in situations where an upfront investment is required and any deception is only revealed sometime later upon use. Safety critical systems such as airbags are a model example of this - a counterfeit of deficient functionality won't be discovered until it deploys, which in most cases will never happen.
That said, while I certainly can't speak to business or diplomatic translations, when it comes to cultural works (ie entertainment) the appeal of machine translation to me has been gradually increasing over time as it gets better. I don't generally find localization desirable and in some cases it even leads to significant confusion when a change somehow munges important details or references. Confusion which I'm generally able to trivially resolve by referencing machine output.
It makes research harder too, since more and more public information is infected by AI content. Both published posts and internet discussions are tainted.
And then the AI companies threaten to crash the whole economy if we don't let them do it.
Wouldn't this be the reason for not calling it transformative but simple copyright theft?
No, a reduction in traffic is not sufficient to conclude that a copyright violation has occurred. Sure, it might have. Alternatively it might have produced a lossy summary in which case the reduction in traffic raises some difficult questions about the value of the original work.
In other cases an LLM can synthesize a genuinely useful explanation of a subject that is precisely tailored to the needs of the asker. In those cases the machine output might well prove more useful to the asker than any single original reference would have.
For something like news where what you're paying for is timely delivery it makes sense to restrict automated (not just LLM) access for the first few days because a similarly timely summary will capture the majority of the value proposition of your service.
That's not typical though. For example, I'm certainly not going to be satisfied with a summary of the plot of a book I'm interested in. Would you want to watch a 10 minute highlights reel in place of a 2 hour feature length film?
I have friends that made a descent buck 20-30 years ago translating technical documents like car manuals. Over the years, prices fell from quarters per words to fractions of a cent.
And even though machine translation was barely existent, tools were used to argue higher productivity and therefore lower prices.
These translations are not perfect, yet. But good enough for my needs. Any professional translator services would in any case be beyond our budget. The advantage of using agentic coding tools here (enabled by using a site generator rather than a CMS) is that I can get systematic about dealing with jargon, SEO, and frequently used phrases. I simply document all that and instruct the tool to refer to that. The funny thing is that most of the models are pretty good at fixing their own mistakes if you just ask them too. I asked it to look for examples of "denglish" (German English) in its own German translations and then to fix it. It found a few examples and the suggested fixes were fine.
A lot of people are focusing on the negative here. I like to look at the positive. We're approaching the moment where any person on this planet will be able to communicate directly with any other person on this planet without the need for translators. The tools already exist for this. But they need a lot of work on quality.
A second point here is that the role of English as the most popular intermediary language is disappearing as well. I'm not a native speaker. When I talk to foreigners from wherever, it's mostly in (bad) English. By definition that limits me to talking to people that have had enough education and exposure to English. This is very limiting. A lot of the people we need to talk to here in Germany aren't all that comfortable speaking English.
vhhn•1h ago
hwers•1h ago
AlecSchueler•1h ago
yurishimo•1h ago
arcanemachiner•43m ago
entuno•1h ago
fithisux•1h ago
The rest is closed source.
jbreckmckye•46m ago
wartywhoa23•38m ago
And I don't think most of those came from idealistic people without any vested interest in AI business.
pipo234•27m ago
On top of that the open source market will increasingly be flooded with (well intended) AI slop built by junior devs.
ginko•20m ago