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Unlike 3.5, GPT-4 is competent at translation. Not just competent; it's better than most human translators. We might not want to leave it to its own devices yet

Unlike 3.5, GPT-4 is competent at translation. Not just competent; it's better than most human translators. We might not want to leave it to its own devices yet, but there's a large number of novels that were never translated, or were only translated badly. Personally, I've been setting things up to have it translate a series of light novels from Japanese to English. Experiments through the chat interface show it's working; now I just need API access, to fully automate it.

yosito 4y ago
> GPT-4 is competent at translation That really depends on the language. It's still kinda awkward at Hungarian. Personally, I think DeepL is still way better at translation.
- numeri 4y ago
  In what ways would you say its awkward? I'm really curious about its performance in languages that might not have shown up in its training data much. I will say, I've tried using it with a dialect, and it's good when it chooses to use the dialect, but slips into formal/prestige language extremely often.
realusername 4y ago
Text translation is basically solved with DeepL, at least on the languages it supports, it's indistinguishable for my native language. This is not talked much right now but language learning will become a hobby at this point between the increasing quality of speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  No electronic solution can ever come close to having a real spoken conversation with another person. DeepL and other AI translators are great for text, though.
  - realusername 4y ago
    The bricks are already there, just not perfectly stitched together I give you that, we already have near perfect text translation for some languages, high quality earbuds, near perfect voice synthesis in some research papers. Sure right now you can't use a product which works very well with those bricks together (I've seen some but it's still unconvincing) but in 5 years maximum this is a solved problem. I'm even expecting the global English level to peak and then decrease because of that in the next 20 years. Learning foreign languages is very hard and less people would continue it just as a hobby if they have some software doing it for them.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    It can come close enough that if the choice is between an expensive live translator and a cheap (or free) voice-to-voice machine translation, then many people might prefer the latter.
    - carlosjobim 4y ago
      You don't need either. We as humans are very good at communicating with each other even if we use different languages. What is important is not the words that are said, but the interaction between humans, which include much more than just words. If you talk with a stranger it is usually something along the lines of needing to find a place or person, wanting to eat, drink or sleep. As people are intelligent, most will understand just from the situation what is the likely mission or needs of the stranger. The other purpose of talking with another person is to socialize and establish acquaintance or friendship. An AI will not help you with establishing a human connection. It is all in the tone of voice, the body language, the eyes, the smile. If you want to communicate anything complicated or different than the above, a written translation is preferable. In almost all situations, using an AI voice translation will be met by the reaction "Why is this creepy man bothering me?"
- famouswaffles 4y ago
  Translation is not solved with deepl at ll. Not with difficult language pairs (English/Chinese, English/Japanese, English/korean etc ). That's where LLMs shine. Far ahead.
  - realusername 4y ago
    I admit I don't speak Japanese or Korean, for the French / English pair, the current level is identical to a professional translator.
    - famouswaffles 4y ago
      I agree deepl is excellent at English/French and other similar languages
deleted 4y ago
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benlivengood 4y ago
We should really start pointing the giant LLMs at animal vocalizations and get cross-species translation. There's some prior work: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-scientists-are-using-ai-to-talk-to-animals/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-scientists-ar...
- thret 4y ago
  I really hope we're able to use LLMs to understand animals in the near future. They are communicating, and we should be able to communicate back.
syntaxing 4y ago
Do you have an example of this!?!! There's so many untranslated light novels I want to read but the ML translation has been historically terrible where it's not readable. Being able to translate light novels without a translator/scanlator would be huge.
- famouswaffles 4y ago
  i don't compare with GPT-4 and it's chinese but https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translations https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...

yosito 4y ago

> GPT-4 is competent at translation That really depends on the language. It's still kinda awkward at Hungarian. Personally, I think DeepL is still way better at translation.

numeri 4y ago
In what ways would you say its awkward? I'm really curious about its performance in languages that might not have shown up in its training data much. I will say, I've tried using it with a dialect, and it's good when it chooses to use the dialect, but slips into formal/prestige language extremely often.

realusername 4y ago

Text translation is basically solved with DeepL, at least on the languages it supports, it's indistinguishable for my native language. This is not talked much right now but language learning will become a hobby at this point between the increasing quality of speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis.

carlosjobim 4y ago
No electronic solution can ever come close to having a real spoken conversation with another person. DeepL and other AI translators are great for text, though.
- realusername 4y ago
  The bricks are already there, just not perfectly stitched together I give you that, we already have near perfect text translation for some languages, high quality earbuds, near perfect voice synthesis in some research papers. Sure right now you can't use a product which works very well with those bricks together (I've seen some but it's still unconvincing) but in 5 years maximum this is a solved problem. I'm even expecting the global English level to peak and then decrease because of that in the next 20 years. Learning foreign languages is very hard and less people would continue it just as a hobby if they have some software doing it for them.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  It can come close enough that if the choice is between an expensive live translator and a cheap (or free) voice-to-voice machine translation, then many people might prefer the latter.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    You don't need either. We as humans are very good at communicating with each other even if we use different languages. What is important is not the words that are said, but the interaction between humans, which include much more than just words. If you talk with a stranger it is usually something along the lines of needing to find a place or person, wanting to eat, drink or sleep. As people are intelligent, most will understand just from the situation what is the likely mission or needs of the stranger. The other purpose of talking with another person is to socialize and establish acquaintance or friendship. An AI will not help you with establishing a human connection. It is all in the tone of voice, the body language, the eyes, the smile. If you want to communicate anything complicated or different than the above, a written translation is preferable. In almost all situations, using an AI voice translation will be met by the reaction "Why is this creepy man bothering me?"
famouswaffles 4y ago
Translation is not solved with deepl at ll. Not with difficult language pairs (English/Chinese, English/Japanese, English/korean etc ). That's where LLMs shine. Far ahead.
- realusername 4y ago
  I admit I don't speak Japanese or Korean, for the French / English pair, the current level is identical to a professional translator.
  - famouswaffles 4y ago
    I agree deepl is excellent at English/French and other similar languages

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

benlivengood 4y ago

We should really start pointing the giant LLMs at animal vocalizations and get cross-species translation. There's some prior work: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-scientists-are-using-ai-to-talk-to-animals/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-scientists-ar...

thret 4y ago
I really hope we're able to use LLMs to understand animals in the near future. They are communicating, and we should be able to communicate back.

syntaxing 4y ago

Do you have an example of this!?!! There's so many untranslated light novels I want to read but the ML translation has been historically terrible where it's not readable. Being able to translate light novels without a translator/scanlator would be huge.

famouswaffles 4y ago
i don't compare with GPT-4 and it's chinese but https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translations https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...