Post #617529

2026-03-10 21:04 UTC

@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.

Replies (7)

@ccferrie@mastodon.ie 2026-03-10 21:07

@cstross @Gargron I have a friend who worked for years as a translator (English to French) but in recent years he found that he was no longer being asked to translate but to "post-edit" machine translations. It was taking him just as long, paying him less, and destroying his soul. He now works as a tour guide.

Open ##1902365
@tkalvas@mastodontti.fi 2026-03-10 21:11

@cstross @Gargron The first causes far more trouble than it saves. Easier just to do the work yourself. The second is true. Source: dad, who translated most King, Grafton, and Ludlum to Finnish.

Open ##1902374
@pare@kamu.social 2026-03-10 21:12

@cstross @Gargron My (very not translator) impression is that human translators who have worked from rough machine translations, say that it’s harder than just translating the text. Also, today I was in a work info session, where the talks were translated by some MS PoS thing, from Finnish to English. The results were horrendous, if hilarious. It might get better but I don’t really know why. Good simultaneous interpretation is kind of a human-level problem, really. Context matters!

Open ##1902375
@jgg@qoto.org 2026-03-10 21:32

@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.

Open ##1902376
@gourd@indiepocalypse.social 2026-03-10 22:55

@cstross @Gargron chiming in with "every translator I know hates this" And also my brief attempt at using speech to text in making subtitles for something gave me stuff that was just off enough in timing and correctness it took me more time to fix than doing it entirely by hand.

Open ##1902377
@Firlefanz@writing.exchange 2026-03-11 07:49

@cstross I sometimes translate text (bilingual German-English). And I have edited a machine-translated book, and let me tell you it does NOT save time. I basically had to go back and rewrite almost every sentence. It was so bad the publisher actually put me on the cover as translator. DeepL is good for short non-fiction stuff, and even that needs to be polished if you want to use it for anything serious. Do not rely on anything AI. Never. @Gargron

Open ##1902378
@sotolf@polymaths.social 2026-03-11 13:02

@cstross @Gargron As someone that has done some translation work, a machine translation template has ended up being more of a hinderance to me than help, it makes my brain lock into a pattern of the choices made by it, and it ends up being a way more clunky and weird feeling text than something I translated from the start.

Open ##1902379