6 ms·

Machine translation isn't super human yet. But yes, it's probably only a few years away.

ben_w 4y ago
It 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 4y ago
  I 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 4y ago
I 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 4y ago
  Have 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 4y ago
    Agreed. 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 4y ago
      Not 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 4y ago
        Apparently 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 4y ago
        I'm not sure what you tried to do ? You tried to translate to another language or ?
        famouswaffles 4y ago
        I think you're trying to translate to japanese ? anyway this is what i got 実際に翻訳のためにGPT-4を使ったことがありますか？本当に、使ってみたら簡単に明確な意味だけを伝えるという話は消えるでしょう。
- AlanYx 4y ago
  >no machine translation system currently in existence could translate the 逆転裁判 games to Ace Attorney games Maybe it's already in the training set, but GPT-4 does give that exact translation. I've found that GPT-4 is exceptionally good at translating idioms and other big picture translation issues. Where it occasionally makes mistakes is with small grammatical and word order issues that previous tools do tend to get right.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    > Maybe it's already in the training set, but GPT-4 does give that exact translation. The corpus includes Wikipedia, so yes, it's in there. That's the kind of thing I'd expect it to be good at, along with idioms, when the model gets large enough. I meant that no machine translation system could translate the games. Thanks to an early localisation decision, you have to do more than just translate words into words for this series, making it a hard problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Wright:_Ace_Attorney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Wright:_Ace_Attorney > While the original version of the game takes place in Japan, the localization is set in the United States; this became an issue when localizing later games, where the Japanese setting was more obvious. Among other things, translators have to choose which Japanese elements to keep and which to replace with US equivalents, while maintaining internal consistency with the localisation decisions of previous games. Doing a good job requires more than just linguistic competence: there's nothing you could put in the corpus to give a GPT-style system the ability to perform this task.
  - numpad0 4y ago
    Can you try this[0]? I have no access to the -4... Have 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. Bing Chat: GPT-4を翻訳に使用したことがありますか？本当に明示的な意味しか伝えられないという話は、試してみれば午後には簡単に反証できます。 (Have you utilized GPT-4 for translations? The story that only really explicit meaning can be conveyed, can be easily disproved by afternoon if tried.) Google: 実際にGPT-4を翻訳に使ったことはありますか? 真剣に、明示的な意味だけを理解することについてのこのすべての話は、あなたが試してみるだけなら、午後には簡単に払拭されるでしょう. (Have you actually used GPT-4 for translation? Seriously, This stories of all about understanding solely explicit meanings are, if it is only for you to try, will be easily swept away by afternoon.) DeepL: 実際にGPT-4を使って翻訳したことがあるのですか？明示的な意味しか伝わらないという話は、やってみようと思えば、午後には簡単に払拭されるはずです。 (Do you have experience of actually translating using GPT-4? The story that only explicit meaning is conveyed, if so desired, can be easily swept away by afternoon) If I'd do it: GPT-4を翻訳に使ったことがあって言ってる? 真面目に言って、表層的な意味しか取れないとかないって暇な時にやってみれば分かると思うんだけど。 (Are you saying having used GPT-4 for translation? Seriously speaking, I think that it only gets superficial meaning isn't [true] if [you] would try [it] when [you'd] have time.) 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35530380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35530380
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
carabiner 4y ago
Google Translate works great for having conversations with spanish speakers right now. Don't know how well it works for other languages.
- IX-103 4y ago
  A 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 4y ago
It'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 4y ago
  There 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 4y ago
Doubt 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 4y ago
  Can 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 4y ago
    Maybe 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.

It 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 4y ago
I 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 4y ago

I 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 4y ago
Have 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 4y ago
  Agreed. 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 4y ago
    Not 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 4y ago
      Apparently 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 4y ago
        I'm not sure what you tried to do ? You tried to translate to another language or ?
      - famouswaffles 4y ago
        I think you're trying to translate to japanese ? anyway this is what i got 実際に翻訳のためにGPT-4を使ったことがありますか？本当に、使ってみたら簡単に明確な意味だけを伝えるという話は消えるでしょう。
AlanYx 4y ago
>no machine translation system currently in existence could translate the 逆転裁判 games to Ace Attorney games Maybe it's already in the training set, but GPT-4 does give that exact translation. I've found that GPT-4 is exceptionally good at translating idioms and other big picture translation issues. Where it occasionally makes mistakes is with small grammatical and word order issues that previous tools do tend to get right.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  > Maybe it's already in the training set, but GPT-4 does give that exact translation. The corpus includes Wikipedia, so yes, it's in there. That's the kind of thing I'd expect it to be good at, along with idioms, when the model gets large enough. I meant that no machine translation system could translate the games. Thanks to an early localisation decision, you have to do more than just translate words into words for this series, making it a hard problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Wright:_Ace_Attorney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Wright:_Ace_Attorney > While the original version of the game takes place in Japan, the localization is set in the United States; this became an issue when localizing later games, where the Japanese setting was more obvious. Among other things, translators have to choose which Japanese elements to keep and which to replace with US equivalents, while maintaining internal consistency with the localisation decisions of previous games. Doing a good job requires more than just linguistic competence: there's nothing you could put in the corpus to give a GPT-style system the ability to perform this task.
- numpad0 4y ago
  Can you try this[0]? I have no access to the -4... Have 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. Bing Chat: GPT-4を翻訳に使用したことがありますか？本当に明示的な意味しか伝えられないという話は、試してみれば午後には簡単に反証できます。 (Have you utilized GPT-4 for translations? The story that only really explicit meaning can be conveyed, can be easily disproved by afternoon if tried.) Google: 実際にGPT-4を翻訳に使ったことはありますか? 真剣に、明示的な意味だけを理解することについてのこのすべての話は、あなたが試してみるだけなら、午後には簡単に払拭されるでしょう. (Have you actually used GPT-4 for translation? Seriously, This stories of all about understanding solely explicit meanings are, if it is only for you to try, will be easily swept away by afternoon.) DeepL: 実際にGPT-4を使って翻訳したことがあるのですか？明示的な意味しか伝わらないという話は、やってみようと思えば、午後には簡単に払拭されるはずです。 (Do you have experience of actually translating using GPT-4? The story that only explicit meaning is conveyed, if so desired, can be easily swept away by afternoon) If I'd do it: GPT-4を翻訳に使ったことがあって言ってる? 真面目に言って、表層的な意味しか取れないとかないって暇な時にやってみれば分かると思うんだけど。 (Are you saying having used GPT-4 for translation? Seriously speaking, I think that it only gets superficial meaning isn't [true] if [you] would try [it] when [you'd] have time.) 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35530380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35530380
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

carabiner 4y ago

Google Translate works great for having conversations with spanish speakers right now. Don't know how well it works for other languages.

IX-103 4y ago
A 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 4y ago

It'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 4y ago
There 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 4y ago

Doubt 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 4y ago
Can 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 4y ago
  Maybe 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.