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What translation models are better than LLMs? The problem with Google-Translate-type models is the interface is completely wrong. Translation is not sentence->
by edflsafoiewq 1y ago
What translation models are better than LLMs?
The problem with Google-Translate-type models is the interface is completely wrong. Translation is not sentence->translation, it's (sentence,context)->translation (or even (sentence,context)->(translation,commentary)). You absolutely have to be able to input contextual information, instructions about how certain terms are to be translated, etc. This is trivial with an LLM.
- thatjoeoverthr 1y agoThis is true, and LLMs crush Google in many translation tasks, but they do too many other things. They can and do go off script, especially if they "object" to the content being translated. "As a safe AI language model, I refuse to translate this" is not a valid translation of "spierdalaj".
- selfhoster11 1y agoThat's literally an issue with the tool being made defective by design by the manufacturer. Not with the tool-category itself.
- Aachen 1y agoWas thinking the same about the censoring, but going off-script? Have you seen DeepL or similar tools invent things?
- thatjoeoverthr 1y agoI've seen people use ChatGPT to translate for them, and seen it embellish texts with its typical obsessions, like "combining" and "engagement".
- thatjoeoverthr 1y agoIndeed. 200 OK with "I refuse" in the body is not valid JSON, either, nor is it decodable by any backend or classical program.
- raphlinus 1y agoThe converse, however, is a different story. "Spierdalaj" is quite a good translation of "As a safe AI language model, I refuse to translate this."
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ifdefdebug 1y agohaha that word. back in the 80ies,some polish friends of mine taught me that but refused to tell me what it meant and instructed me to never, ever use it. Until today I don't know what it is about...
- bird0861 1y agoOne would have to be absolutely cooked to consider using a censored model to translate or talk about anything a preschooler's ears can't hear. There are plenty of uncensored models that will run on less than 8GB of vram.
- albertzeyer 1y agoI'm not sure what type of model Google uses nowadays for their webinterface. I know that they also actually provide LLM-based translation via their API. Also the traditional cross-attention-based encoder-decoder translation models support document-level translation, and also with context. And Google definitely has all those models. But I think the Google webinterface has used much weaker models (for whatever reason; maybe inference costs?). I think DeepL is quite good. For business applications, there is Lilt or AppTek and many others. They can easily set up a model for you that allows you to specify context, or be trained for some specific domain, e.g. medical texts. I don't really have a good reference for a similar leaderboard for translation models. For translation, the metric to measure the quality is anyway much more problematic than for speech recognition. I think for the best models, only human evaluation is working well now.
- gpm 1y agoI've been using small local LLMs for translation recently (<=7GB total vram usage) and they, even the small ones, definitely beat Google Translate in my experience. And they don't require sharing whatever I'm reading with Google, which is nice.
- yubblegum 1y agoWhat are you using? whisper?
- gpm 1y agoEdit: Huh, didn't know whisper could translate. Just whatever small LLM I have installed as the default for the `llm` command line tool at the time. Currently that's gemma3:4b-it-q8_0 though it's generally been some version of llama in the past. And then this fish shell function (basically a bash alias) function trans llm "Translate \"$argv\" from French to English please" end
- codethief 1y ago> Uh, translation, not transcription Whisper can translate to English (and maybe other languages these days?), too.