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When I was growing up in the 2000s, it was required to learn a foreign language in school. I took Spanish but dropped the class after a year, thinking that when
by pubby 3y ago
When I was growing up in the 2000s, it was required to learn a foreign language in school. I took Spanish but dropped the class after a year, thinking that when I grew up, computers would be able to translate text far better humans could.
Would you believe it, transformers were invented ten years later.
I wonder if it's worth learning anything anymore.
- cypress66 3y agoMachine translation isn't super human yet. But yes, it's probably only a few years away.
- ben_w 3y agoIt might not be super human in the sense of beating the C2 standard, but it sure knows more German than I do. And Spanish, and Greek, and Esperanto, and… well, everything. But I've been really trying with that German.
- sour-taste 3y agoI moved to Japan recently so have been trying to learn the language. Im atrociously bad and dream of the day when I can read a sentence without getting tripped up on kanji, grammar, etc. I mentioned this to a coworker who has been studying for several years and she said she just uses Google translate for everything. Even with her pretty good japanese, translate is better and faster than she is for doing things like going through forms, letters, etc. We may reach a point where computers are good enough that they beat all but native speakers, maybe.
- wizzwizz4 3y agoI don't get why people are so optimistic about machine translation. Computers can get explicit meaning across – that's obvious to anyone who understands linear algebra, information theory, and linguistics. But many aspects of translation (puns, tone, cultural context) aren't just about mapping from one vector space to another. A human, no matter how fluently bilingual, would have to think about the problem, and the current systems don't think. If we keep working on them, these systems will likely get better and better at low-level translation (including translating idioms), but no machine translation system currently in existence could translate the 逆転裁判 games to Ace Attorney games. Perhaps computers can do it – I don't see a theoretical reason they shouldn't be able to – but it would take a fundamentally different approach.
- famouswaffles 3y agoHave you actually used GPT-4 for translation? Seriously all this talk about only getting explicit meaning across would be easily dispelled in an afternoon if you only bothered to try.
- qorrect 3y agoAgreed. A lot of these responses read like they haven't actually tried it yet. Which is also interesting, I myself actively put off trying it until I eventually gave in. It seems a lot of us are doing the same, maybe its a case of "how good could it actually be?"
- famouswaffles 3y agoNot trying it yet is fine. Making declarative statements on a product you haven't even used is just absurd. Dude clearly hasn't used GPT for translation before and his next reply is telling me the ways GPT should fail based on his pre-conceived notions of its abilities. Except i have actually extensively tested(publicly too) LLMs for translation (even before GPT-4) and basically everything he says is just plain wrong. I'll never understand why people behave like this.
- numpad0 3y agoApparently GPT-4 can't handle "all this talk about only getting explicit meaning across would be easily dispelled in an afternoon if you only bothered to try.", which isn't simple as "Ace Attorney" but I'd think it's still a small stretch to say "everything he says is just plain wrong".
- famouswaffles 3y agoI'm not sure what you tried to do ? You tried to translate to another language or ?
- famouswaffles 3y ago
- carabiner 3y agoGoogle Translate works great for having conversations with spanish speakers right now. Don't know how well it works for other languages.
- IX-103 3y agoA large portion of the model is common (and cross-trained) across multiple languages. Only a small part is for language specific encoding/decoding. That means that not only is it easier for them to add language, but you can expect similar performance across languages. Also you can mix and match encoders and decoders to translate whichever languages you want, and it will just work. Previously there was a separate model for each language pair.
- jacquesm 3y agoIt's superhuman compared to a lot of humans. Especially when you factor in that even the most accomplished individuals rarely have more than five or six languages that they are really good at (exceptions exist) so that makes machine translation superhuman for the vast majority of the human/language pairs.
- redox99 3y agoThere is a very clear benchmark here though. Can you use GPT4 translations "as is" for your product[1]? I've used GPT a fair bit for English<->Spanish (both directions) for my product, and I often have to fix the odd word here and there (but it saves a lot of time as a starting point). And my English is far from perfect, but fortunately GPT's mistakes are orthogonal to mine. When you don't need to pay a translator, then it's at human/superhuman level. [1] Assuming you want good translations, of course. There have always been those amusingly bad Google Translate translations of owners that simply did not care.
- numpad0 3y agoDoubt it … GPTs speak any language they know natively, but if asked for translations they seem unable to deal with sentence structures and logics that exists in the source but not allowed in the target language. When that happens they fail to recognize gibberishness of that.
- M4v3R 3y agoCan you provide an example? Because from my experience it's the exact opposite - GPT-4 can handle translation, especially when there are complex sentences and context that needs to be kept across sentences, way better than Google Translate currently can.
- numpad0 3y agoMaybe this is a dirty secret about Japanese: it's often necessary to basically ghostwrite sentences to go to/from English, because direct word-for-word substitutions won't make sense. GPTs don't seem to do that, and as far as my exposure to them(<3.5) goes, they don't seem to understand what I'm talking about.
- MengerSponge 3y agoIf you don't want to leave home? No. You don't need to learn anything anymore. It does help, though, to learn the basic abilities of the most commonly played heroes and a few standard item/ability builds. But if you want to travel? Go to Mexico City or Madrid? Automated translation is better than nothing, but it's not at all the same as communicating fluently with someone.
- DC-3 3y agoI truly pity you for thinking that learning a foreign language is a redundant exercise because of machine translation. And besides, though machines may perform well on menus and tax returns, I hardly think them on the cusp of emitting fine translations of great poems or novels.
- MengerSponge 3y agoI literally had a menu two days ago that translated "confit" as "candied". I'm not sure I'd trust a machine on a menu or my tax returns yet.
- famouswaffles 3y agoBilingual/Multilingual LLMs are human level translators more or less. The only way you can think "not on the cusp" is if you haven't actually used GPT-4 for translation. Use it and you'll be set straight pretty quickly.
- DC-3 3y agoI haven't used GPT-4 for translation so I acknowledge I might be wrong. But GPT-3 was such an irredeemably terrible poet that it made me sceptical that this type of software could ever develop aesthetic taste or artistic vision. Moreover – and I understand this is an uncharitable thing to say, but it is my honest observation – time and again I have noticed the inability of AI cheerleaders to judge literature on its artistic merits. This doesn't hold universally, but it's common enough that I have resolved to regard such claims with extreme doubt.
- dwaltrip 3y agoGpt-4 is a far better poet than gpt-3. It isn’t world-class and may be missing some ineffable poetic soul, but its attempts are definitely notable and interesting. They seem mostly better than what I could write with significant effort. Oh and I should emphasize that the quality and specificity of the prompt has a huge effect on the output. I agree that gpt-3 was pretty trash at poetry, at least compared to human standards. It was impressive for AI, obviously.
- joe_the_user 3y agoEven if machines could translate perfectly they wouldn't make you able to speak to people on the street in a foreign country. I mean, in X years maybe we'll have "real time" devices but they'd be extremely clunky unless they were working from brainwaves or something.
- isoprophlex 3y agoGetting good enough that you can make a pun in a foreign language is almost entirely worth it, if you can spare the time.
- paxys 3y agoIf you wanted to learn Spanish specifically to get a job in language translation then sure, dropping it was likely the correct decision. Most people learn languages to, you know, actually speak with other people.
- maCDzP 3y agoThe cool thing about learning a new language really well, is that it creates a new world. You get to learn words that describe things that your mother tongue can’t. Just like a programming language? Some things are easy and other things are hard to express depending if you use LISP or Python. I believe it’s the same with spoken languages. Some thoughts are easy to articulate, other hard. And it’s cool to shift language depending on what you want to articulate.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoCars exist but we still run and walk.
- 876978095789789 3y agoLearning a second language is a huge investment of time, and at least some money, that will soon have no significant economic upside.