Post #617457

2026-03-10 20:56 UTC

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.

Replies (8)

@Gargron__dup_1@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 20:59

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.

Open ##617493
@pozuelen@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 21:02

@Gargron@mastodon.social totalmente de acuerdo, compañero.

Open ##617517
@benroyce__dup_2975@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 21:32

@Gargron@mastodon.social 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

Open ##617886
@sloanlance@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 22:19

@Gargron@mastodon.social 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.

Open ##618166
@howtophil@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 22:21

@Gargron@mastodon.social This.

Open ##618174
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 23:29

@Gargron@mastodon.social 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.

Open ##619046
@em_and_future_cats@mastodon.social 2026-03-11 02:54

@Gargron@mastodon.social 💯💯💯💯💯💯‼️

Open ##620660
@Nawer_Rapter@mastodon.social 2026-03-11 21:28

@Gargron@mastodon.social me, who has seen machine translations from japanese games from the past 10+ years on RPGmaker games: machine poetry is and will always be machine poetry.

Open ##623185