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As a native Bulgarian speaker and web surfer, I am experiencing this first-hand with most local web content. Apart from the stories on local politics and the oc

As a native Bulgarian speaker and web surfer, I am experiencing this first-hand with most local web content. Apart from the stories on local politics and the occasional crime-related article, most of the other content is poorly-translated text from SEO-driven English sources. It's not just the web, either. Crappy American books that were trendy decades ago are translated and marketed as a cool thing. Local writers and content producers have adopted the same artificial way of writing.

debesyla 3y ago
Same in Lithuania, but half of websites are of russian origin. I wish there was a search engine that let me disable all the low-effort machine-translated websites from the results.
- gog 3y ago
  Same in Croatia with Russian content.
  - vlabakje90 3y ago
    Can you explain? I'm curious to why this is the case. It's more evident to me in the case of Lithuania.
    - gog 3y ago
      Not sure I understand the question. Croatia is a small country and we don't have vast amounts of content in our own language, so when I search I often get bombarded with machine translated content from Russian origin. I suppose it is Russian, since there are images with text written on them that is in cyrillic. If it were Serbian (they also use cyrillic) there would be no need for translation since we basically speak the same language and a lot of Serbian content is in latin alphabet also.
      - vlabakje90 3y ago
        I'm just genuinely curious. I also live in a small country with a limited number of L1+2 speakers and I never see any machine translated content from Russian sources. It's not immediately obvious why Croatia would have Russian and not, say, German or English sources for machine translated content.
- larodi 3y ago
  Maybe there will be soon, actually I see it as inevitable the so called "search engines" to become even more content aware, regarding synthetic text
usrusr 3y ago
Will machine translation help low-headcount languages or be their death knell? I see multiple forces at play: machine translation lessens the pressure to properly learn whatever happens to be the lingua franca in the greater region. But it also increases competition for writers who might want to write in their small language, increasing pressure to directly address the much greater market. We might see a return to something resembling the "all educated writing is in Latin" of European history until after Newton, just with a much lower threshold. This has some truly weird implications, e.g. once language model translations switch from subtitles to dubbing it will effectively stop shifts in pronunciation, because the models won't be re-trained with an ear to the street.
- gumby 3y ago
  > This has some truly weird implications, e.g. once language model translations switch from subtitles to dubbing it will effectively stop shifts in pronunciation, because the models won't be re-trained with an ear to the street. This has already happened to a great degree thanks first to radio and the television, as well as the early 20th century movement to “received pronounciation” in many countries. E.g. TV finally killed off thee and thou in the 1960s It often feels like there are regional accent variations but they are usually quite minimal these days thanks to spread of technology. The in Europe, explicit suppression or uniformation of language began AFAIK with Louis XIII and his deliberate formation of “France” (as opposed to just a collection of regions controlled by one person). In China I believe the same thing was instigated by the (by coincidence contemporary!) Qing dynasty, but it might have been a lot earlier. In any case it really zoomed throughout the world in the 20th century when communication technologies and practices were adopted by the emerging nationalist movements. So machine translation will simply continue a longstanding process.
  - yorwba 3y ago
    Rapid communication over long distances is flattening regional differences, but that doesn't stop language change. It probably speeds it up instead, because any new trend can reach the entire population much more quickly. Rapid communication over long distances in time might be able to put a stop to that, e.g. if teens end up interacting more with simulacra of long-dead actors than others of their own age, there could be some weird effects. But I think that's unlikely to happen, since someone is bound to come up with a more popular version that has all the newest slang.
andy_ppp 3y ago
This doesn't just extend to text but all media has become corrupted by activity on the Internet. People have started arguing with nonsense/outright lies in the real world as if they are on Twitter, TV Shows are now structures in terms of short "game puzzle" like segments where you have to collect the girl from behind enemy lines or fight the end of level boss. Everything has become more like YouTube with faster cuts and repeated phrases "again again again". Teletubbies has a lot to answer for, or maybe I am just getting old :-)
eurekin 3y ago
Polish one here. I just skip almost all our content now and go directly to english speaking sources. Press, TV, radio, online articles, books, yt videos -- a big part of them is more or less "inspired" or straight up licensed. Very difficult to come across truly original content, even when it's claimed truly original (e.g. dancers like to tell that their shows are original, but they take "master classes" from foreign teachers anyway).
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  Culturally, it's annoying and damaging particularly to the younger generation. We have YouTube "podcasters" dressed in loose hoodies, skimming over such articles and making a one-hour commentary show. They can never write cohesively structured text in English, yet their Bulgarian vocabulary is invaded by Americanisms used in Reddit – "cringe", "suspense", "guys", etc.
  - kridsdale1 3y ago
    When I learned French in school 25 years ago, Americanisms were a major part of the vocabulary, especially in cool guy slang.
  - Scaless 3y ago
    What you are hearing as "suspense" is likely "sus". "sus" is short for "suspicious", and was popularized by the viral video game 'Among Us'.
- wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
  Im sorry to tell you this, but it may just be that you are intelligent enough to notice, and many others are not. I bet you a lot of people even like it and would defend it. That could be why it is prolific.
  - hiddencost 3y ago
    I dunno. I think people are smarter than you give them credit for.

debesyla 3y ago

Same in Lithuania, but half of websites are of russian origin. I wish there was a search engine that let me disable all the low-effort machine-translated websites from the results.

gog 3y ago
Same in Croatia with Russian content.
- vlabakje90 3y ago
  Can you explain? I'm curious to why this is the case. It's more evident to me in the case of Lithuania.
  - gog 3y ago
    Not sure I understand the question. Croatia is a small country and we don't have vast amounts of content in our own language, so when I search I often get bombarded with machine translated content from Russian origin. I suppose it is Russian, since there are images with text written on them that is in cyrillic. If it were Serbian (they also use cyrillic) there would be no need for translation since we basically speak the same language and a lot of Serbian content is in latin alphabet also.
    - vlabakje90 3y ago
      I'm just genuinely curious. I also live in a small country with a limited number of L1+2 speakers and I never see any machine translated content from Russian sources. It's not immediately obvious why Croatia would have Russian and not, say, German or English sources for machine translated content.
larodi 3y ago
Maybe there will be soon, actually I see it as inevitable the so called "search engines" to become even more content aware, regarding synthetic text

usrusr 3y ago

Will machine translation help low-headcount languages or be their death knell? I see multiple forces at play: machine translation lessens the pressure to properly learn whatever happens to be the lingua franca in the greater region. But it also increases competition for writers who might want to write in their small language, increasing pressure to directly address the much greater market. We might see a return to something resembling the "all educated writing is in Latin" of European history until after Newton, just with a much lower threshold. This has some truly weird implications, e.g. once language model translations switch from subtitles to dubbing it will effectively stop shifts in pronunciation, because the models won't be re-trained with an ear to the street.

gumby 3y ago
> This has some truly weird implications, e.g. once language model translations switch from subtitles to dubbing it will effectively stop shifts in pronunciation, because the models won't be re-trained with an ear to the street. This has already happened to a great degree thanks first to radio and the television, as well as the early 20th century movement to “received pronounciation” in many countries. E.g. TV finally killed off thee and thou in the 1960s It often feels like there are regional accent variations but they are usually quite minimal these days thanks to spread of technology. The in Europe, explicit suppression or uniformation of language began AFAIK with Louis XIII and his deliberate formation of “France” (as opposed to just a collection of regions controlled by one person). In China I believe the same thing was instigated by the (by coincidence contemporary!) Qing dynasty, but it might have been a lot earlier. In any case it really zoomed throughout the world in the 20th century when communication technologies and practices were adopted by the emerging nationalist movements. So machine translation will simply continue a longstanding process.
- yorwba 3y ago
  Rapid communication over long distances is flattening regional differences, but that doesn't stop language change. It probably speeds it up instead, because any new trend can reach the entire population much more quickly. Rapid communication over long distances in time might be able to put a stop to that, e.g. if teens end up interacting more with simulacra of long-dead actors than others of their own age, there could be some weird effects. But I think that's unlikely to happen, since someone is bound to come up with a more popular version that has all the newest slang.

andy_ppp 3y ago

This doesn't just extend to text but all media has become corrupted by activity on the Internet. People have started arguing with nonsense/outright lies in the real world as if they are on Twitter, TV Shows are now structures in terms of short "game puzzle" like segments where you have to collect the girl from behind enemy lines or fight the end of level boss. Everything has become more like YouTube with faster cuts and repeated phrases "again again again". Teletubbies has a lot to answer for, or maybe I am just getting old :-)

eurekin 3y ago

Polish one here. I just skip almost all our content now and go directly to english speaking sources. Press, TV, radio, online articles, books, yt videos -- a big part of them is more or less "inspired" or straight up licensed. Very difficult to come across truly original content, even when it's claimed truly original (e.g. dancers like to tell that their shows are original, but they take "master classes" from foreign teachers anyway).

bluetomcat 3y ago
Culturally, it's annoying and damaging particularly to the younger generation. We have YouTube "podcasters" dressed in loose hoodies, skimming over such articles and making a one-hour commentary show. They can never write cohesively structured text in English, yet their Bulgarian vocabulary is invaded by Americanisms used in Reddit – "cringe", "suspense", "guys", etc.
- kridsdale1 3y ago
  When I learned French in school 25 years ago, Americanisms were a major part of the vocabulary, especially in cool guy slang.
- Scaless 3y ago
  What you are hearing as "suspense" is likely "sus". "sus" is short for "suspicious", and was popularized by the viral video game 'Among Us'.
wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
Im sorry to tell you this, but it may just be that you are intelligent enough to notice, and many others are not. I bet you a lot of people even like it and would defend it. That could be why it is prolific.
- hiddencost 3y ago
  I dunno. I think people are smarter than you give them credit for.