2026-09-30 23:28 UTC
Replies (3)
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@Minnesota411988@mastodon.social 2026-09-30 23:41
@antonio106@ottawa.place @mrundkvist@archaeo.social My experience as a reader is that something is off, humorously wrong, awkward with machine translations longer than a sentence or two. You might get the gist of it but it would be bad as a literary work.
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@timtfj@mastodon.social 2026-10-01 00:48
@antonio106@ottawa.place @mrundkvist@archaeo.social Someone might read the translated text. More serious answer: literal translations can look ludicrously wrong, or oddly laboured, or include things that only make sense if you know the original language well enough to see what phrase the original text might have had and how it might have been misinterpreted. Eg the Swedish tweet I once saw translated as "Welcome, new tracking devices!".
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@mrundkvist@archaeo.social 2026-10-01 04:58
@antonio106@ottawa.place There's software that can identify text generated from scratch by an LLM. So my guess is that it could analyse a translation in the same way. But the issue here really isn't whether the guy would get caught. It's that when he uses machine translation software, he's not actually translating. He's copy editing. Which is paid way, way less per word. This is true even if he only uses translation *support* software like TRADOS. So it's breach of contract. #translation #llm