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There's no point in offering people something they can easily make themselves. Especially when it comes to machine translation. I often see YouTube videos with
by vintermann 3y ago
There's no point in offering people something they can easily make themselves. Especially when it comes to machine translation.
I often see YouTube videos with gratingly bad Norwegian titles. I believe YouTube upranks videos if the creator provides translations, and plenty of sleazy video creators just machine translate their titles to umpteen languages. Since it's a low-context translation, just one random line pasted into GT with the translator having no idea what it's about, even the best machine translation in the world will frequently produce junk.
And I have to translate the junk back into English to understand what the title was probably supposed to be. It does not help me.
(By incentivizing this junk, Google is probably poisoning its own translation training data, but that's another matter).
So two hard rules should be
1. always leave up to the user whether to use machine translation or not
2. always clearly mark translated text, especially machine translated.
Gutenberg should not waste space hosting machine translated works, unless they put a lot of effort into ensuring the quality of the translations, effort that the user couldn't easily replicate.