@Gargron__dup_1@mastodon.social
Post #617493
2026-03-10 20:59 UTC
Replies (20)
-
@cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop 2026-03-10 21:04
@Gargron@mastodon.social 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.
-
@foobarsoft@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 21:15
@Gargron@mastodon.social Native speaker: I think you’re right. Though I have seen warnings recently about “new translation” editions on Amazon that are just LLM trash.
-
@etchedpixels@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 21:33
@Gargron@mastodon.social 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.
-
@grb090423@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 21:48
@Gargron@mastodon.social Well said. 👍
-
@Stefan_S_from_H@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 22:23
@Gargron@mastodon.social 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.
-
@Gargron__dup_1@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 22:24
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.
-
@Offbeatmammal@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 22:40
@Gargron@mastodon.social 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!
-
@vy@mastodon.social 2026-03-10 23:52
@Gargron@mastodon.social there is a great essay on translation by Simon Leys
-
@GeePawHill__dup_17816@mastodon.social 2026-03-11 02:07
@Gargron@mastodon.social 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.
-
@VileLasagna@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-03-10 21:02
@Gargron Back in my pretentious high schooler days I read Dante's Comedy and, don't know where from, the version I found was one that was like... fully translated as poetry, like in the Italian* original, going as far as trying to replicate the rhyme structure No computer's ever going to pull off anything even remotely that mad
-
@Tacas@donphan.social 2026-03-10 21:06
@Gargron Crunchyroll also experiments with machine translated subtitles for Japanese anime, and the community (anglophone or not) is not happy with it.
-
@funcrunch@me.dm 2026-03-10 21:06
@Gargron - I think the most recent translated book series I read was Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy,* translated into English by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen. I don't know a word of Chinese, but I can't imagine machine translation doing these great works any justice. * Later adapted into the Netflix series 3 Body Problem
-
@Steve@social.coop 2026-03-10 21:06
@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.
-
@jgrg@mstdn.science 2026-03-10 21:08
@Gargron I've just bought an English translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. I wondered which was the best translation, and found a website with multiple translations of the opening page. It was really interesting how different they were. The one by Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor was the clear winner for me.
-
@gorfeld@masto.es 2026-03-10 21:13
@Gargron Many times when I land on an auto-translated site I have to change the language to english because I don't even understand what's supposed to mean.
-
@cktodon@mas.to 2026-03-10 21:17
@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.
-
@mayank@front-end.social 2026-03-10 21:24
@Gargron 💯 languages are usually not 1:1, and translation is impossible to automate without butchering the original meaning. bad translation really sticks out when you understand both languages. even if it's serviceable enough to get the core meaning across, it might fail to capture the tone, the cultural references, and the full weight. i have a lot of respect for people who create good subtitles that try to preserve the original intent, even when it sometimes feels impossible.
-
@ronanmcd@mastodon.green 2026-03-10 21:30
@Gargron I am an anglophone, but read in French from time to time. I tend to have a machine translator nearby to augment my poor vocabulary. Last book I read it told me nineteenth century Breton people had horses hoofs on their feet. The actual translation should have been clogs. This stuff is constant, that's just one I remember
-
@DenOfEarth@mas.to 2026-03-10 21:39
@Gargron And it's not just expressions and turns of phrase, which are unique not only to each language but easily to each region. It's words. There is often no exact match. Many words in one language are not a precise correspondence to those in another. So an elegant turn of phrase in one becomes a wordy explanation in the other. Or a misinterpretation. Only someone fluent in both languages can convey the true meaning accurately and eloquently.
-
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-03-10 21:55
@Gargron@mastodon.social I think anglophones experience start difference between good and bad translations more often through video games