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> the job of a professional translator (for text) at this point is mostly starting with a machine translation and slightly tweaking it in order to produce somet
by groby_b 6y ago
> the job of a professional translator (for text) at this point is mostly starting with a machine translation and slightly tweaking it in order to produce something more natural.
Not really, no. That might be true for instruction booklet translation (they sure read like it), but no, for a decent translation, you'll need to let a human have a full go at it.
Writing is as much about filtering & tweaking GPT-3 output as sculpting is about "removing everything that doesn't look like the final sculpture", as the old adage goes.
It is useful for one purpose: To do an absolutely minimal job and to externalize some more work onto end users. It'll also be popular for spam^W SEO, and for writing filler content for content graveyards. It will not, however, be useful for writing.
I have no doubt that we'll see a lot more tooling supporting writing, and machine-assisted writing. I have equally no doubt that GPT-3 and friends aren't going to be it.
- Clewza313 6y agoSure, "decent" translation as in novels etc will continue to be hand-crafted, but the vast majority of translation is low-end bulk stuff like business reports and technical documentation, paid pennies per word. I know one (former) professional translator, and dumping text into Google Translate was always her starting point. Interestingly, her job got harder when Google rolled out the new deep learning models, because instead of outputting visibly broken garbage that kind of flagged itself for checking, it now tends to produce beautifully formed sentences with subtle but often critical fuckups (wrong sense of a word, missing negation, parsing a pronoun incorrectly, etc) that can affect meaning.