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> literally asking the LLM to translate an english phrase to german I tried it a few times on arena.lmsys.org and given the prompt "Please translate "We thank
by winkelmann 2y ago
> literally asking the LLM to translate an english phrase to german
I tried it a few times on arena.lmsys.org and given the prompt "Please translate "We thank you for your business" into German", the most common result was "Wir danken Ihnen für Ihr Geschäft", I got one bad result from some random tiny model and some more extensive responses from Gemini with suggestions for more idiomatic expressions. Modern LLMs are typically smart enough to understand this nuance when translating to German.
- selfhoster11 2y agoThat’s an interesting result. I’ve re-run your prompt with one change (made it “translate idiomatically” instead) to guide models towards a more natively German mode of expression and a few actually came back with a more appropriate phrase than that literal translation.
- ttepasse 2y agoWould you’d like to share? The most analogue I can come up with would be ”Danke für Ihren Einkauf” – but that wouldn't be printed on an invoice. The only place where I can see such a sentence would be on thermoprinted receipts from POS, those small boilerplate nobody reads. That’s my point: You can make a semantically and possible idiomatic translation but it would be still _culturally_ wrong to use it in this context.