3 ms·

I worked as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator for twenty years, until 2005. After a break in academia, I am now semiretired, doing translation part-tim

I worked as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator for twenty years, until 2005. After a break in academia, I am now semiretired, doing translation part-time and following closely developments in machine translation and in AI in general. Two advantages of LLM-based translation are that it is promptable and nondeterministic. While Google Translate, DeepL, etc. will translate a text the same way every time, LLMs let you specify the purpose and desired style of the translation, and you can ask for multiple translations of the same text. Lately, I’ve been translating some speeches from Japanese to English. While I used to translate such texts by myself, now I first run them through LLMs (Claude 2 and GPT-4) to get three or four different English versions. I refer to those MT versions as well as the Japanese original while I prepare my own draft. This has two advantages for me: the multiple translations often give me ideas for English expressions that would not have occurred to me on my own, and I am able to devote more of my energy to polishing the final versions. Another way I use LLMs is as a thesaurus on overdrive. If I have a Japanese expression that I understand but can’t think of a good way to express in English—this happens a lot; that’s why translation is difficult—I will give the expression to GPT-4, explain the purpose of the text, provide additional context if necessary, and ask for ten English renditions of the expression. There will almost always be one or two versions that I like. Here is an example of ten English translations by GPT-4 of the same Japanese text: https://www.gally.net/temp/20230915pmtranslations.html https://www.gally.net/temp/20230915pmtranslations.html Several months ago, I made some videos about ChatGPT and translation, if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/@Tom_Gally_UTokyo https://www.youtube.com/@Tom_Gally_UTokyo

qingcharles 3y ago
This is fascinating, as it mirrors how I use GPT to code. I generally use it to find a solution, that is often not quite accurate, but opens a wide range of ideas that I often would not have come up with myself. サンキュー! (* ^ ω ^)

qingcharles 3y ago

This is fascinating, as it mirrors how I use GPT to code. I generally use it to find a solution, that is often not quite accurate, but opens a wide range of ideas that I often would not have come up with myself. サンキュー! (* ^ ω ^)