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What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

288 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

rehearsalsj 1y ago
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shebeurb 1y ago
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dr_dshiv 1y ago
In my limited experience, LLMs can have issues with translation tone — but these issues are pretty easily fixed with good prompting. I want to believe there will be even more translators in the future. I really want to believe it.
- alganet 1y ago
  > easily fixed with good prompting Can you give us an example of a typical translation question and the "good prompting" required to make the LLM consider tone?
  - simonw 1y ago
    There was a great thread about that here four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42894215#42897856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42894215#42897856
    - alganet 1y ago
      Good, but not exactly what I expected for "easily fixed". It includes a lot of steps and constant human evaluation between them, which implies that decisions about tone are ultimately made by whoever is prompting the LLM, not the LLMs themselves. > "If they are generally in the style I want..." > "choosing the sentences and paragraphs I like most from each..." > "I also make my own adjustments to the translation as I see fit..." > "I don’t adopt most of the LLM’s suggestions..." > "I check it paragraph by paragraph..." It seems like a great workflow to speed up the work of an already experienced translator, but far from being usable by a layman due to the several steps requiring specialized human supervision. Consider the scenario presented by the blog post regarding bluntness/politeness and cultural sensitivities. Would anyone be able to use this workflow without knowing that beforehand? If you think about it, it could make the tone even worse.
      - nottorp 1y ago
        > It seems like a great workflow to speed up the work of an already experienced translator, but far from being usable by a layman due to the several steps requiring specialized human supervision. Just like programming. And anything else "AI" assisted. Helps experts type less.
        alganet 1y ago
        Most of my time as a programmer is not spent typing.
        nottorp 1y ago
        Do you like typing that boilerplate though?
        alganet 1y ago
        Of course not. I don't like boilerplate code _at all_. I worked with Java for a couple of years. Lots of boilerplate required. The IDE handled them just fine. I never felt I needed something smarter in order to write verbose stuff. My style is completely different though. Whenever I can, I will choose languages and technologies that don't require boilerplate. https://wiki.c2.com/?BoilerPlateCode https://wiki.c2.com/?BoilerPlateCode However, this is deviating from the subject (look at the original post again). We're not talking about dumb, automated boilerplate code. The discussion is much deeper, drawing parallels with tone in translations. We're obviously talking about non-boilerplate.
darvinyraghpath 1y ago
Fascinating thought piece. While I agree with the thrust of the piece: 'that llms can't really replace engineers', unfortunately the way the industry works is that the excuse of AI, however grounded in reality has been repurposed as a cudgel against actual software industry workers. Sure eventually everyone might figure out that AI can't really write code by itself - and software quality will degrade.. But unfortunately we've long been on the path of enshitification and I fear the trend will only continue. If google's war against its own engineers has resulted in shittier software - and things start break twice a year instead of once - would anyone really blink twice?
- tartoran 1y ago
  Maybe AI can't replace engineers but it surely can apply downward pressure on engineers' salaries.
  - lodovic 1y ago
    I don't believe that. Software has become so expensive in the last decade, that only very large enterprises and venture capitalists were still building custom applications (ymmv). LLMs make it cheaper and faster to create software - you don't need these large teams and managers anymore, just a few developers. Smaller companies will be back in the game.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      > Smaller companies will be back in the game. Smaller companies that can afford smaller salaries you mean? I'm not sure that is at odds with what the post you were replying to said
      - lodovic 1y ago
        Smaller teams, not smaller salaries
krackers 1y ago
This seems like a terrible comparison since Google Translate is completely beat by DeepL, let alone LLMs. (Google Translate almost surely doesn't use an LLM, or at least not a _large_ one given its speed)
- Ninjinka 1y ago
  For Google's Cloud Translation API you can choose between the standard Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model or the "Translation LLM (Google's newest highest quality LLM-style translation model)". https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/advanced/translating-text-v3 https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/advanced/translating... DeepL also has a translation LLM, which they claim is 1.4-1.7x better than their classic model: https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/next-gen-language-model https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/next-gen-language-model
- ethan_smith 1y ago
  Google Translate has actually been using neural machine translation since 2016 and integrated PaLM 2 (a large language model) in 2023 for over 100 languages, though DeepL does still outperform it in many benchmarks.
- AndroTux 1y ago
  That’s absolutely not the point of this article. The point was that people said, once Google Translate was introduced, that translators would lose their jobs. Just like people say the same thing about developers with LLMs nowadays. The point is: they didn’t, and they won’t. DeepL is not part of that point. Yes, maybe eventually, developers will lose their jobs to something that is an evolution of LLMs. But that’s not relevant here.
  - resoluteteeth 1y ago
    > The point was that people said, once Google Translate was introduced, that translators would lose their jobs. Just like people say the same thing about developers with LLMs nowadays. The point is: they didn’t, and they won’t. Translators are losing their jobs now though. Google translate wasn't very good for Japanese so a lot of people assumed that machine translation would never be a threat, but deepl was better to the point where a lot of translation moved to just cleaning up it's output and current state of the art llms as of the last six months are much better and can also be given context and other instructions to reduce the need for humans to clean up the output. When the dust settles translation as a job is probably going to be dead.
tkgally 1y ago
> ... a translators’ and interpreters’ work is mostly about ensuring context, navigating ambiguity, and handling cultural sensitivity. This is what Google Translate cannot currently do. Google Translate can't, but LLMs given enough context can. I've been testing and experimenting with LLMs extensively for translation between Japanese and English for more than two years, and, when properly prompted, they are really good. I say this as someone who worked for twenty years as a freelance translator of Japanese and who still does translation part-time. Just yesterday, as it happens, I spent the day with Claude Code vibe-coding a multi-LLM system for translating between Japanese and English. You give it a text to be translated, and it asks you questions that it generates on the fly about the purpose of the translation and how you want it translated--literal or free, adapted to the target-language culture or not, with or without footnotes, etc. It then writes a prompt based on your answers, sends the text to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, creates a combined draft from the three translations, and then sends that draft back to the three models for several rounds of revision, checking, and polishing. I had time to run only a few tests on real texts before going to bed, but the results were really good--better than any model alone when I've tested them, much better than Google Translate, and as good as top-level professional human translation. The situation is different with interpreting, especially in person. If that were how I made my living, I wouldn't be too worried yet. But for straight translation work where the translator's personality and individual identity aren't emphasized, it's becoming increasingly hard for humans to compete.
- lukax 1y ago
  Try Soniox for real-time translation (interpreting). With the limited context it has in real-time, it's actually really good. https://soniox.com https://soniox.com Disclaimer: I work for Soniox.
  - dr_dshiv 1y ago
    I’ve been looking for that! Thanks
- felipeerias 1y ago
  It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to provide additional context, ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text. I live in Japan. Almost every day I find myself asking things like “what does X mean in this specific setting?” or “how do I tell Y to that specific person via this specific medium?”. Much of this can be further automated via custom instructions, so that e.g. the LMM knows that text in a particular language should be automatically translated and explained.
philsnow 1y ago
The distinction between what people typically imagine a translator's job is and the reality reminds me of pixar movies being "localized" instead of just translated (green beans on a plate in the Japan release instead of broccoli because that's the food that Japanese kids don't like). Lacking cultural context while reading translated texts is what made studying history finally interesting to me.
- few 1y ago
  Another infamous example is Brock's "jelly filled donuts" in pokemon https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brocks-jelly-doughnuts https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brocks-jelly-doughnuts
  - amake 1y ago
    It's important to distinguish that from the Pixar thing. First, the Pixar thing was green pepper, not green beans: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-inside-out-has-different-scenes-in-other-countries-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-inside-out-has-different... Second, the Pixar one is not "mere" translation; it is full localization because they changed the visual to match the "textual" change. The Pokemon one is where the change was limited to the "text". The translator's heart might have been in the right place (it would depend on how integral to the story it is that the item is onigiri) but didn't have the authority to make the full breadth of changes needed for such adaptation to be successful.
    - archievillain 1y ago
      It has little to do with authority and more to do with the effort/return ratio. Visual edits are expensive and dialogue changes are cheap, so it doesn't make sense to redraw frames just for an irrelevant onigiri. 4Kids was very well known to visually change the japanese shows they imported if they thought it was worth it, mostly in the context of censorship. For example, all guns and cigarettes where removed from One Piece, turned into toy guns and lollipops instead. The most infamous example, however, has got to be Yu-Gi-Oh!. Yu-Gi-Oh started as a horror-ish manga about a trickster god forcing people to play assorted games and cursing their souls when they inevitably failed to defeat him. The game-of-the-week format eventually solidified into the characters playing one single game, Duel Monsters (the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG itself in the real world), and the horror-ish aspects faded away, although they still remained part of the show's aesthetic, based around Egyptian human sacrifices and oddly-card-game-obsessed ancient cults. When the manga was adapted to the screen, it started directly with a softer tone[1], especially because the show was to be a vehicle for selling cards in the real world, not dissimilarly to Pokemon and MANY other anime from the era. Nothing that happens in the show is particularly crude or shocking, it had that kind of soft edginess that fit well with its intended target audience (early teens). I imagine watching Bambi had to be much more traumatizing than anything in the show. But that was still not enough for 4Kids, which had a pretty aggressive policy of no violence or death. Kind of problematic when the show's main shtick was "Comically evil villain puts our heroes in a contraption that will kill them if they don't win." (You can imagine the frequency these traps actually triggered neared zero). To solve this, 4Kids invented the Shadow Realm. The show, thanks to its occultist theming, already had examples of people being cursed, or their souls being banished or captured. 4Kids solidified these vague elements into the shadow realm as a censorship scape-goat. Any reference to death was replaced with the shadow realm. Now, one might wonder why the censors thought that "hell-like dimension where your soul wanders aimlessly and/or gets tortured for eternity" was in any way less traumatizing than "you'll die", but I imagine it's because there was always the implication that people could be 'saved' from the shadow realm[2] by undoing the curse. The Shadow Realm was a massive part of the western Yu-Gi-Oh mythos and even today it's a fairly common meme to say that somebody got "sent to the shadow realm", which makes it all funnier that it is not part of the original show. A couple funny examples off the top of my head: - Yugi must win a match while his legs are shackled. Two circular saws, one for him and one for the enemy, are present in the arena. They near the two competitors as they lose Life Points, with the loser destined to have their legs cut off. In the 4Kids adaptation, the saws are visually edited to be glowing blue, and it's stated they're made out of dark energy that will send anybody that touches it to the shadow realm. - A group of our heroes fight a group of villains atop of a skyscraper with a glass roof. In the original version, the villains state that the roof has been boobytrapped so that the losing side will explode, plunging the losers to their death by splattening. In the 4Kids version, the boobytrap remained, but the visuals were edited to add a dark mist under the glass, with the villains stating that there's a portal under the roof that will send anybody that touches it to the shadow realm. This is made funnier when the villains lose and they're shown to have had parachutes with them all along, and they are NOT edited out. [1] Technically speaking, there was a previous adaptation that followed the manga more closely and got only one season, generally referred to as Season 0. [2] It does eventually happen in the anime that the heroes go in an alternate dimension to save somebody's cursed soul. Obviously, this dimension was directly identified as the Shadow Realm in the localization.
sodality2 1y ago
This article is spot on about a lot of things. One thing I think it fails to address is this: > I feel confident in asserting that people who say this would not have hired a translator or learned Japanese in a world without Google Translate; they’d have either not gone to Japan at all, or gone anyway and been clueless foreigners as tourists are wont to do. The correlation here would be something like: the people using AI to build apps previously would simply never have created an app, so it’s not affecting software development as a career as much as you first expect. It would be like saying AI art won’t affect artists, because the people who would put in such little effort probably would never have commissioned anyone. Which may be a little true (at least in that it reduces the impact). However, I don’t necessarily know if that’s true for software development. The ability to build software enabled huge business opportunities at very low costs. I think the key difference is this: the people who are now putting in such low effort into commissioning software maybe did hire software engineers before this, and that might throw off a lot of the numbers.
- MarkusQ 1y ago
  Conversely, it may create jobs. Why? Because the more elephants you have in your parade, the more jobs there are for folks to walk behind them with a broom and bucket. For decades we've seen tools that "let users write their own software" and every one of them has driven up the demand for people to clean it up, make it scale, make it secure, or otherwise clean up the mess.
  - sodality2 1y ago
    Also true! But that world is one where the vast majority of time is spent cleaning up slop code, so if there's a general shift towards that, I think that still changes the job in a significant way. (I don't have extensive history in the industry yet so I may be wrong here)
    - MarkusQ 1y ago
      <tired old fart voice> It's all cleaning up slop code. Always has been. </tired old fart voice> More optimistically, you can think of "user created code" as an attempt at a design document of sorts; they were trying to tell you (and the computer) what they wanted in "your language". And that dialog is the important thing.
carlosjobim 1y ago
As long as the person you are talking or writing to is aware that you're not a native speaker, they will understand that you won't be able to follow conventions around polite languages or understand subtle nuances on their part. It's really a non issue. The finer clues of language are intended for people who are from the same culture.
devnullbrain 1y ago
>All this is not to say Google Translate is doing a bad job Google Translate is doing a bad job. The Chrome translate function regularly detects Traditional Chinese as Japanese. While many characters are shared, detecting the latter is trivial by comparing unicode code points - Chinese has no kana. The function used to detect this correctly, but it has regressed. Most irritatingly of all, it doesn't even let you correct its mistakes: as is the rule for all kinds of modern software, the machine thinks it knows best.
- simonw 1y ago
  That doesn't sound like a problem with Google Translate, it sounds like a problem with Google Chrome. I believe Chrome uses this small on-device model to detect the language before offering to translate it: https://github.com/google/cld3#readme https://github.com/google/cld3#readme
  - devnullbrain 1y ago
    Archived in 2024
    - simonw 1y ago
      Looks like it's still vendored by Chromium: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/main/third_party/cld_3 https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/main/third_party/c...
- numpad0 1y ago
  IMO, it's still not too late and it'll never be too late to split and reorganize Unicode by languages - at least split Chinese and Japanese. LLMs seem to be having issues acquiring both Chinese and Japanese at the same time. It'll make sense for both languages. The syntaxes aren't just different but generally backwards, and, it's just my hunch but, they sometimes sound like they are confused about which modifies word which.
- jjani 1y ago
  It's only a matter of time before they have an LLM both 1. cheap 2. fast 3. good enough that they'll replace Google Translate's current model with it. I'd be very surprised if they'd put more than 1 hour of maintenance into Translate's current iteration over the last 12 months.
NicuCalcea 1y ago
While it's just anecdotal evidence, I have translator friends and work has indeed been drying up over the past decade, and that has only accelerated with the introduction of LLMs. Just check any forum or facebook group for translators, it's all doom and gloom about AI. See this reddit thread, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/comments/173okwg/deepl_just_made_me_cry/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/comments/173okwg... While professionals still produce much better quality translations, the demand for everything but the most sensitive work is nearly gone. Would you recommend your offspring get into the industry?
- tossaway0 1y ago
  I imagine even for professional teams with clients that need proper translations, LLMs have made it so one person can do the work of many. The difference between the quality of former automatic translations and LLM translations is huge; you couldn't rely on auto translation at all. Now a professional service only needs a reviewer to edit what the LLM produces. You can even ask the LLM to translate in certain tones, dialects, etc. and they do it very well.
deleted 1y ago
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neilv 1y ago
Some additional things that translators do (which I recall from a professional translator friend, put in my own words): * Idioms (The article mentions in passing that this isn't so much a difficulty in Norwegian->English, but of course idioms usually don't translate as sentences) * Cultural references (From arts, history, cuisine, etc. You don't necessarily substitute, but you might have to hint if it has relevant connotations that would be missed.) * Cultural values (What does "freedom" mean to this one nation, or "passion" to this other, or "resilience" to another, and does that influence translation) * Matching actor in dubbing (Sometimes the translation you'd use for a line of a dialogue in a book doesn't fit the duration and speaking movements of an actor in a movie, so the translator changes the language to fit better.) * Artful prose. (AFAICT, LLMs really can't touch this, unless they're directly plagiarizing the right artful bit)
yieldcrv 1y ago
This is like the worst comparison since generative AI is far better at conversational translation than google translate LLM’s will tell you idioms, slang, and the point behind it You can take a screenshot of telegram channels for both sides of a war conflict and get all context in a minute In classic HN fashion I’m sure I missed the point, ok translators are still in demand got it. Google Translate has been leapfrogged by the same thing that allows for “vibecoding”
noname120 1y ago
The article starts with a giant straw man and miscaracterisation, not sure that I want to read the rest of the article at this point
- BergAndCo 1y ago
  Literally the first example is an outright lie. > At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English). Google Translate just gives the blunt direct translation. "To will" means "it is my will", i.e. to want to, which became the future tense in English. In Norwegian is still means "want", and Google Translate indeed translates it as "I want the potatoes." If you translate the rising (pleading) intonation on "potatoes", you then have an unwritten "please?", i.e. "I want the potatoes?...", which is passable English. Most businesses think AI code is "good enough", and that machine translation is "good enough", which tanks the entire industry because there is now more supply than demand. He says there are still plenty of translator jobs, but then justifies it as because "it’s inadvisable to subsititute (sic) Google Translate for an interpreter at a court hearing." Meaning, the thing taking away all the tech jobs temporarily (unchecked mass-migration) is the same thing keeping keeping him employed temporarily.
ryao 1y ago
> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English) where a brit might say “Could I please have some potatoes?”. I find “I will have the potatoes” to be perfectly fine English and not haughty in the slightest. Is this a difference between British English and American English?
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  When ordering, "I will have" sounds reasonable. When asking someone to pass them to you, just imagine them turning to you, looking you in the eye, and asserting "I will have the potatoes" like it's some kind of ultimatum. Yes, that is strange.
  - roxolotl 1y ago
    It’s such an anachronistic statement I laughed out loud reading your comment. I even was taught that you can’t pass things mid air. You place the potatoes down between each person required to pass them to the person who wants them.
    - jvanderbot 1y ago
      A non sequitur perhaps?
- noobermin 1y ago
  Americans are extremely polite, and American English is replete with niceties in everyday speech. It's funny, having been a tourist abroad, it's only living in a significantly non American country for a few years that lead me to realise this. I even lived in another country albeit a former US colony for ten years and didn't even notice it there given American influence. I stopped saying, stuff "I would like a latte today" or more Midwestern (could I get a latte today etc) in singapore because people would just get confused. Same with being too polite when recieving things. There's ways to be polite but it usually involves less words because anything else confuses people.
jezzamon 1y ago
I was thinking about this comparison recently along a slightly different axis: One challenge when working with translations (human or machine translations) as that you can't vet whether it's correct or not yourself. So you just have to either trust the translation and hope it's the best. It's a lot easier to trust a person than a machine, though I have had someone message me once to say "this translation of your article is so bad I feel like the translator did not put in a serious attempt" It's similar to vibe coding where the user truly doesn't know how to create the same thing themselves: You end up with output that you have no way of knowing it's correct, and you just have to blindly trust it and hope for the best. And that just doesn't work for many situations. So you still need expertise anyway (either yours or someone else's)
- stevage 1y ago
  Well no, you can run the output. That gives you some measure of correctness.
  - danpalmer 1y ago
    No I think the original comment is correct. You need to be able to evaluate the result. The goal of software is not to compile and run, it's to solve a problem for the user when running. If you don't know enough about the problem to be able to assess the output of the program then you can't trust that it's actually doing the right thing. I've seen code generated by LLMs that runs, does something, and that the something would be plausible to a layperson, but that I know from domain knowledge and knowing the gotchas involved in programming that it's not actually correct. I think the comparison with translation is a very apt one.
- eurleif 1y ago
  You can kinda validate machine translation by doing a circular translation, A->B->A. It's not a perfect test, but it's a reasonably strong signal.
  - ruszki 1y ago
    I’m learning German, and I quite often use this test. Google Translate fails this most of the times. This is true even between Hungarian and English. The difference with the latter one is, that I can properly choose between the options given to me, if there are, without translating it back. Especially, that that passed many times when it gave terrible translations. So this test fails many times, and even when not, the translation is still usually not good. However, when you don’t care about nuances, it’s still fine usually. And also translation seems to be better if the text is larger. Translating a single word does almost always fail. Translating a whole article is usually fine. But even there it matters what you translate. Translating the Austrian subreddit fails quite often. Sometimes completely for whole large posts. Translating news is better.
autobodie 1y ago
"Behold the impeccable nuance of my opinion"
Kiro 1y ago
> I see claims from one side that “I used $LLM_SERVICE_PROVIDER to make a small throwaway tool, so all programmers will be unemployed in $ARBITRARY_TIME_WINDOW”, and from the other side flat-out rejections of the idea that this type of tool can have any utility. No, the one side is saying that all their code is written by LLMs already and that's why they think that. In fact, I would say the other side is the former ("it works for throwaway code but that's it") and that no-one is flat-out rejecting it.
banq 1y ago
LLM=Google Translate +Context
DidYaWipe 1y ago
Hopefully it tells everyone to never use this douchey term again.
camillomiller 1y ago
>> For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s inconceivable that some future form of AI could handle context and ambiguity as well as humans do, but I do think we’re at least one more AI winter away from that, especially considering that today’s AI moguls seem to have no capacity for nuance, and care more about their tools appearing slick and frictionless than providing responsible output. Fantastic closing paragraph! Loved the article
Seanambers 1y ago
Prompting and context solves this.
nottorp 1y ago
There was a fun one on OSNews: https://www.osnews.com/story/142469/that-time-ai-translation-almost-caused-a-fight-between-a-doctor-and-my-parents/ https://www.osnews.com/story/142469/that-time-ai-translation...
yoden 1y ago
Machine translation is a great example. It's also where I expect AI coding assistants to land. A useful tool, but not some magical thing that is going to completely replace actual professionals. We're at least one more drastic change away from that, and there's no guarantee anyone will find it any time soon. So there's not much sense in worrying about it. A very similar story has been happening in radiology for the past decade or so. Tech folks think that small scale examples of super accurate AIs mean that radiologists will no longer be needed, but in practice the demand for imaging has grown while people have been scared to join the field. The efficiencies from AI haven't been enough to bridge the gap, resulting in a radiologist _shortage_.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  Just a note on the radiologist part, the current SOTA radiology AI is still tiny parameter CNN's from the mid-late 2010's running locally. NYT ran an article a few weeks about this, and the entire article uses the phrase "A.I.", which people assume means ChatGPT, but really can refer to anything in the last 60 years of A.I. research. Manually digging revealed it was an old architecture. We don't know yet how a modern transformer trained on radiology would perform, but it almost certainly would be dramatically better.
  - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
    That wouldnt be that much different than current CNN/labeling methods used on medical imaging. Last time I got a ct scan the paperwork had the workstation specs and the models/nueral network techniques used.
  - demosthanos 1y ago
    > We don't know yet how a modern transformer trained on radiology would perform, but it almost certainly would be dramatically better. Why? Is there something about radiology that makes the transformer architecture appropriate? My understanding has been that transformers are great for sequences of tokens, but from what little I know of radiology sequence-of-tokens seems unlikely to be a useful representation of the data.
p3rls 1y ago
I just posted that Google is translating words that should be translated like "bastard" in foreign pop music (in this case, a member of the most popular boy band in the world, BTS) as racial slurs like the n-word. This is pretty much the worst case error scenario for a translation service. https://kpopping.com/news/2025/Jun/17/Google-Translation-of-BTS-Suga-s-Daechwita-Lyrics-Displays-Racial-Slur https://kpopping.com/news/2025/Jun/17/Google-Translation-of-... It's amazing more people aren't talking about this stuff, how incompetent do you have to be to allow racial slurs in translation, especially with all the weights towards being pro-diversity etc that already exist? Just more enshittification from ol Sundar and the crew
insane_dreamer 1y ago
I've done freelance translation in two different language pairs, for 20 years (mostly as a side thing). A few thoughts on this: - Google Translate has always been garbage for professional translation work, which is why human translators have been needed. - LLMs can write in a way that sounds native (at least in English), which is something that ML translation software was bad at. They can also understand context to some degree and can adopt tones. This is a huge leap forward that makes it suitable for a large majority of translation work _between common language pairs_ (Hindi to Thai is probably safe). - The vast majority of translation work is commercial in nature, and most cases, "decent" is good enough. Cost is prioritized over occasional mistakes. Prices have been falling for years already. Many agencies now pay peanuts because they expect you to use AI and "just" do some light proofreading. Except that often the "light proofreading" was actually "heavy editing" that often took more work than translating from scratch. It's not worth it. - Do not lump translators and interpreters together when discussing this subject. Interpreters aren't going away and their job is much more difficult to replace with AI (for a variety of reasons). What they do is very different than translators (some do both of course). - There are some exceptions to "decent is good enough", where: 1) context/localization is critical (a major advertising campaign), 2) accuracy of the message is critical (a government pronouncement), 3) linguistic excellence is critical (a novel). This may be the most visible parts, but also a very small fraction of the overall market. My conclusion is that translators won't disappear altogether but their ranks will shrink considerably.
voxleone 1y ago
>>For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s inconceivable that some future form of AI could handle context and ambiguity as well as humans do, Absolutely! AI might get better at context, but there's still no substitute for a seasoned dev who’s had to untangle a 2 a.m. deployment gone wrong. As for vibe coders — hey, good vibes are great, but they won’t refactor a legacy monolith on their own.
coolpool 1y ago
I've just launched https://www.verbascan.com/ https://www.verbascan.com/ — it does context-aware photo translations. Still early (doesn’t ask questions yet), but even at this stage, it's clear how much better the results are when intent and nuance are factored in. Would love any feedback if you give it a try.

288 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

In my limited experience, LLMs can have issues with translation tone — but these issues are pretty easily fixed with good prompting. I want to believe there will be even more translators in the future. I really want to believe it.

alganet 1y ago
> easily fixed with good prompting Can you give us an example of a typical translation question and the "good prompting" required to make the LLM consider tone?
- simonw 1y ago
  There was a great thread about that here four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42894215#42897856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42894215#42897856
  - alganet 1y ago
    Good, but not exactly what I expected for "easily fixed". It includes a lot of steps and constant human evaluation between them, which implies that decisions about tone are ultimately made by whoever is prompting the LLM, not the LLMs themselves. > "If they are generally in the style I want..." > "choosing the sentences and paragraphs I like most from each..." > "I also make my own adjustments to the translation as I see fit..." > "I don’t adopt most of the LLM’s suggestions..." > "I check it paragraph by paragraph..." It seems like a great workflow to speed up the work of an already experienced translator, but far from being usable by a layman due to the several steps requiring specialized human supervision. Consider the scenario presented by the blog post regarding bluntness/politeness and cultural sensitivities. Would anyone be able to use this workflow without knowing that beforehand? If you think about it, it could make the tone even worse.
    - nottorp 1y ago
      > It seems like a great workflow to speed up the work of an already experienced translator, but far from being usable by a layman due to the several steps requiring specialized human supervision. Just like programming. And anything else "AI" assisted. Helps experts type less.
      - alganet 1y ago
        Most of my time as a programmer is not spent typing.
        nottorp 1y ago
        Do you like typing that boilerplate though?
        alganet 1y ago
        Of course not. I don't like boilerplate code _at all_. I worked with Java for a couple of years. Lots of boilerplate required. The IDE handled them just fine. I never felt I needed something smarter in order to write verbose stuff. My style is completely different though. Whenever I can, I will choose languages and technologies that don't require boilerplate. https://wiki.c2.com/?BoilerPlateCode https://wiki.c2.com/?BoilerPlateCode However, this is deviating from the subject (look at the original post again). We're not talking about dumb, automated boilerplate code. The discussion is much deeper, drawing parallels with tone in translations. We're obviously talking about non-boilerplate.

darvinyraghpath 1y ago

Fascinating thought piece. While I agree with the thrust of the piece: 'that llms can't really replace engineers', unfortunately the way the industry works is that the excuse of AI, however grounded in reality has been repurposed as a cudgel against actual software industry workers. Sure eventually everyone might figure out that AI can't really write code by itself - and software quality will degrade.. But unfortunately we've long been on the path of enshitification and I fear the trend will only continue. If google's war against its own engineers has resulted in shittier software - and things start break twice a year instead of once - would anyone really blink twice?

tartoran 1y ago
Maybe AI can't replace engineers but it surely can apply downward pressure on engineers' salaries.
- lodovic 1y ago
  I don't believe that. Software has become so expensive in the last decade, that only very large enterprises and venture capitalists were still building custom applications (ymmv). LLMs make it cheaper and faster to create software - you don't need these large teams and managers anymore, just a few developers. Smaller companies will be back in the game.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > Smaller companies will be back in the game. Smaller companies that can afford smaller salaries you mean? I'm not sure that is at odds with what the post you were replying to said
    - lodovic 1y ago
      Smaller teams, not smaller salaries

krackers 1y ago

This seems like a terrible comparison since Google Translate is completely beat by DeepL, let alone LLMs. (Google Translate almost surely doesn't use an LLM, or at least not a _large_ one given its speed)

Ninjinka 1y ago
For Google's Cloud Translation API you can choose between the standard Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model or the "Translation LLM (Google's newest highest quality LLM-style translation model)". https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/advanced/translating-text-v3 https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/advanced/translating... DeepL also has a translation LLM, which they claim is 1.4-1.7x better than their classic model: https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/next-gen-language-model https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/next-gen-language-model
ethan_smith 1y ago
Google Translate has actually been using neural machine translation since 2016 and integrated PaLM 2 (a large language model) in 2023 for over 100 languages, though DeepL does still outperform it in many benchmarks.
AndroTux 1y ago
That’s absolutely not the point of this article. The point was that people said, once Google Translate was introduced, that translators would lose their jobs. Just like people say the same thing about developers with LLMs nowadays. The point is: they didn’t, and they won’t. DeepL is not part of that point. Yes, maybe eventually, developers will lose their jobs to something that is an evolution of LLMs. But that’s not relevant here.
- resoluteteeth 1y ago
  > The point was that people said, once Google Translate was introduced, that translators would lose their jobs. Just like people say the same thing about developers with LLMs nowadays. The point is: they didn’t, and they won’t. Translators are losing their jobs now though. Google translate wasn't very good for Japanese so a lot of people assumed that machine translation would never be a threat, but deepl was better to the point where a lot of translation moved to just cleaning up it's output and current state of the art llms as of the last six months are much better and can also be given context and other instructions to reduce the need for humans to clean up the output. When the dust settles translation as a job is probably going to be dead.

tkgally 1y ago

> ... a translators’ and interpreters’ work is mostly about ensuring context, navigating ambiguity, and handling cultural sensitivity. This is what Google Translate cannot currently do. Google Translate can't, but LLMs given enough context can. I've been testing and experimenting with LLMs extensively for translation between Japanese and English for more than two years, and, when properly prompted, they are really good. I say this as someone who worked for twenty years as a freelance translator of Japanese and who still does translation part-time. Just yesterday, as it happens, I spent the day with Claude Code vibe-coding a multi-LLM system for translating between Japanese and English. You give it a text to be translated, and it asks you questions that it generates on the fly about the purpose of the translation and how you want it translated--literal or free, adapted to the target-language culture or not, with or without footnotes, etc. It then writes a prompt based on your answers, sends the text to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, creates a combined draft from the three translations, and then sends that draft back to the three models for several rounds of revision, checking, and polishing. I had time to run only a few tests on real texts before going to bed, but the results were really good--better than any model alone when I've tested them, much better than Google Translate, and as good as top-level professional human translation. The situation is different with interpreting, especially in person. If that were how I made my living, I wouldn't be too worried yet. But for straight translation work where the translator's personality and individual identity aren't emphasized, it's becoming increasingly hard for humans to compete.

lukax 1y ago
Try Soniox for real-time translation (interpreting). With the limited context it has in real-time, it's actually really good. https://soniox.com https://soniox.com Disclaimer: I work for Soniox.
- dr_dshiv 1y ago
  I’ve been looking for that! Thanks
felipeerias 1y ago
It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to provide additional context, ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text. I live in Japan. Almost every day I find myself asking things like “what does X mean in this specific setting?” or “how do I tell Y to that specific person via this specific medium?”. Much of this can be further automated via custom instructions, so that e.g. the LMM knows that text in a particular language should be automatically translated and explained.

philsnow 1y ago

The distinction between what people typically imagine a translator's job is and the reality reminds me of pixar movies being "localized" instead of just translated (green beans on a plate in the Japan release instead of broccoli because that's the food that Japanese kids don't like). Lacking cultural context while reading translated texts is what made studying history finally interesting to me.

few 1y ago
Another infamous example is Brock's "jelly filled donuts" in pokemon https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brocks-jelly-doughnuts https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brocks-jelly-doughnuts
- amake 1y ago
  It's important to distinguish that from the Pixar thing. First, the Pixar thing was green pepper, not green beans: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-inside-out-has-different-scenes-in-other-countries-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-inside-out-has-different... Second, the Pixar one is not "mere" translation; it is full localization because they changed the visual to match the "textual" change. The Pokemon one is where the change was limited to the "text". The translator's heart might have been in the right place (it would depend on how integral to the story it is that the item is onigiri) but didn't have the authority to make the full breadth of changes needed for such adaptation to be successful.
  - archievillain 1y ago
    It has little to do with authority and more to do with the effort/return ratio. Visual edits are expensive and dialogue changes are cheap, so it doesn't make sense to redraw frames just for an irrelevant onigiri. 4Kids was very well known to visually change the japanese shows they imported if they thought it was worth it, mostly in the context of censorship. For example, all guns and cigarettes where removed from One Piece, turned into toy guns and lollipops instead. The most infamous example, however, has got to be Yu-Gi-Oh!. Yu-Gi-Oh started as a horror-ish manga about a trickster god forcing people to play assorted games and cursing their souls when they inevitably failed to defeat him. The game-of-the-week format eventually solidified into the characters playing one single game, Duel Monsters (the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG itself in the real world), and the horror-ish aspects faded away, although they still remained part of the show's aesthetic, based around Egyptian human sacrifices and oddly-card-game-obsessed ancient cults. When the manga was adapted to the screen, it started directly with a softer tone[1], especially because the show was to be a vehicle for selling cards in the real world, not dissimilarly to Pokemon and MANY other anime from the era. Nothing that happens in the show is particularly crude or shocking, it had that kind of soft edginess that fit well with its intended target audience (early teens). I imagine watching Bambi had to be much more traumatizing than anything in the show. But that was still not enough for 4Kids, which had a pretty aggressive policy of no violence or death. Kind of problematic when the show's main shtick was "Comically evil villain puts our heroes in a contraption that will kill them if they don't win." (You can imagine the frequency these traps actually triggered neared zero). To solve this, 4Kids invented the Shadow Realm. The show, thanks to its occultist theming, already had examples of people being cursed, or their souls being banished or captured. 4Kids solidified these vague elements into the shadow realm as a censorship scape-goat. Any reference to death was replaced with the shadow realm. Now, one might wonder why the censors thought that "hell-like dimension where your soul wanders aimlessly and/or gets tortured for eternity" was in any way less traumatizing than "you'll die", but I imagine it's because there was always the implication that people could be 'saved' from the shadow realm[2] by undoing the curse. The Shadow Realm was a massive part of the western Yu-Gi-Oh mythos and even today it's a fairly common meme to say that somebody got "sent to the shadow realm", which makes it all funnier that it is not part of the original show. A couple funny examples off the top of my head: - Yugi must win a match while his legs are shackled. Two circular saws, one for him and one for the enemy, are present in the arena. They near the two competitors as they lose Life Points, with the loser destined to have their legs cut off. In the 4Kids adaptation, the saws are visually edited to be glowing blue, and it's stated they're made out of dark energy that will send anybody that touches it to the shadow realm. - A group of our heroes fight a group of villains atop of a skyscraper with a glass roof. In the original version, the villains state that the roof has been boobytrapped so that the losing side will explode, plunging the losers to their death by splattening. In the 4Kids version, the boobytrap remained, but the visuals were edited to add a dark mist under the glass, with the villains stating that there's a portal under the roof that will send anybody that touches it to the shadow realm. This is made funnier when the villains lose and they're shown to have had parachutes with them all along, and they are NOT edited out. [1] Technically speaking, there was a previous adaptation that followed the manga more closely and got only one season, generally referred to as Season 0. [2] It does eventually happen in the anime that the heroes go in an alternate dimension to save somebody's cursed soul. Obviously, this dimension was directly identified as the Shadow Realm in the localization.

sodality2 1y ago

This article is spot on about a lot of things. One thing I think it fails to address is this: > I feel confident in asserting that people who say this would not have hired a translator or learned Japanese in a world without Google Translate; they’d have either not gone to Japan at all, or gone anyway and been clueless foreigners as tourists are wont to do. The correlation here would be something like: the people using AI to build apps previously would simply never have created an app, so it’s not affecting software development as a career as much as you first expect. It would be like saying AI art won’t affect artists, because the people who would put in such little effort probably would never have commissioned anyone. Which may be a little true (at least in that it reduces the impact). However, I don’t necessarily know if that’s true for software development. The ability to build software enabled huge business opportunities at very low costs. I think the key difference is this: the people who are now putting in such low effort into commissioning software maybe did hire software engineers before this, and that might throw off a lot of the numbers.

MarkusQ 1y ago
Conversely, it may create jobs. Why? Because the more elephants you have in your parade, the more jobs there are for folks to walk behind them with a broom and bucket. For decades we've seen tools that "let users write their own software" and every one of them has driven up the demand for people to clean it up, make it scale, make it secure, or otherwise clean up the mess.
- sodality2 1y ago
  Also true! But that world is one where the vast majority of time is spent cleaning up slop code, so if there's a general shift towards that, I think that still changes the job in a significant way. (I don't have extensive history in the industry yet so I may be wrong here)
  - MarkusQ 1y ago
    <tired old fart voice> It's all cleaning up slop code. Always has been. </tired old fart voice> More optimistically, you can think of "user created code" as an attempt at a design document of sorts; they were trying to tell you (and the computer) what they wanted in "your language". And that dialog is the important thing.

carlosjobim 1y ago

As long as the person you are talking or writing to is aware that you're not a native speaker, they will understand that you won't be able to follow conventions around polite languages or understand subtle nuances on their part. It's really a non issue. The finer clues of language are intended for people who are from the same culture.

devnullbrain 1y ago

>All this is not to say Google Translate is doing a bad job Google Translate is doing a bad job. The Chrome translate function regularly detects Traditional Chinese as Japanese. While many characters are shared, detecting the latter is trivial by comparing unicode code points - Chinese has no kana. The function used to detect this correctly, but it has regressed. Most irritatingly of all, it doesn't even let you correct its mistakes: as is the rule for all kinds of modern software, the machine thinks it knows best.

simonw 1y ago
That doesn't sound like a problem with Google Translate, it sounds like a problem with Google Chrome. I believe Chrome uses this small on-device model to detect the language before offering to translate it: https://github.com/google/cld3#readme https://github.com/google/cld3#readme
- devnullbrain 1y ago
  Archived in 2024
  - simonw 1y ago
    Looks like it's still vendored by Chromium: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/main/third_party/cld_3 https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/main/third_party/c...
numpad0 1y ago
IMO, it's still not too late and it'll never be too late to split and reorganize Unicode by languages - at least split Chinese and Japanese. LLMs seem to be having issues acquiring both Chinese and Japanese at the same time. It'll make sense for both languages. The syntaxes aren't just different but generally backwards, and, it's just my hunch but, they sometimes sound like they are confused about which modifies word which.
jjani 1y ago
It's only a matter of time before they have an LLM both 1. cheap 2. fast 3. good enough that they'll replace Google Translate's current model with it. I'd be very surprised if they'd put more than 1 hour of maintenance into Translate's current iteration over the last 12 months.

NicuCalcea 1y ago

While it's just anecdotal evidence, I have translator friends and work has indeed been drying up over the past decade, and that has only accelerated with the introduction of LLMs. Just check any forum or facebook group for translators, it's all doom and gloom about AI. See this reddit thread, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/comments/173okwg/deepl_just_made_me_cry/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/comments/173okwg... While professionals still produce much better quality translations, the demand for everything but the most sensitive work is nearly gone. Would you recommend your offspring get into the industry?

tossaway0 1y ago
I imagine even for professional teams with clients that need proper translations, LLMs have made it so one person can do the work of many. The difference between the quality of former automatic translations and LLM translations is huge; you couldn't rely on auto translation at all. Now a professional service only needs a reviewer to edit what the LLM produces. You can even ask the LLM to translate in certain tones, dialects, etc. and they do it very well.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

neilv 1y ago

Some additional things that translators do (which I recall from a professional translator friend, put in my own words): * Idioms (The article mentions in passing that this isn't so much a difficulty in Norwegian->English, but of course idioms usually don't translate as sentences) * Cultural references (From arts, history, cuisine, etc. You don't necessarily substitute, but you might have to hint if it has relevant connotations that would be missed.) * Cultural values (What does "freedom" mean to this one nation, or "passion" to this other, or "resilience" to another, and does that influence translation) * Matching actor in dubbing (Sometimes the translation you'd use for a line of a dialogue in a book doesn't fit the duration and speaking movements of an actor in a movie, so the translator changes the language to fit better.) * Artful prose. (AFAICT, LLMs really can't touch this, unless they're directly plagiarizing the right artful bit)

yieldcrv 1y ago

This is like the worst comparison since generative AI is far better at conversational translation than google translate LLM’s will tell you idioms, slang, and the point behind it You can take a screenshot of telegram channels for both sides of a war conflict and get all context in a minute In classic HN fashion I’m sure I missed the point, ok translators are still in demand got it. Google Translate has been leapfrogged by the same thing that allows for “vibecoding”

noname120 1y ago

The article starts with a giant straw man and miscaracterisation, not sure that I want to read the rest of the article at this point

BergAndCo 1y ago
Literally the first example is an outright lie. > At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English). Google Translate just gives the blunt direct translation. "To will" means "it is my will", i.e. to want to, which became the future tense in English. In Norwegian is still means "want", and Google Translate indeed translates it as "I want the potatoes." If you translate the rising (pleading) intonation on "potatoes", you then have an unwritten "please?", i.e. "I want the potatoes?...", which is passable English. Most businesses think AI code is "good enough", and that machine translation is "good enough", which tanks the entire industry because there is now more supply than demand. He says there are still plenty of translator jobs, but then justifies it as because "it’s inadvisable to subsititute (sic) Google Translate for an interpreter at a court hearing." Meaning, the thing taking away all the tech jobs temporarily (unchecked mass-migration) is the same thing keeping keeping him employed temporarily.

ryao 1y ago

> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English) where a brit might say “Could I please have some potatoes?”. I find “I will have the potatoes” to be perfectly fine English and not haughty in the slightest. Is this a difference between British English and American English?

jvanderbot 1y ago
When ordering, "I will have" sounds reasonable. When asking someone to pass them to you, just imagine them turning to you, looking you in the eye, and asserting "I will have the potatoes" like it's some kind of ultimatum. Yes, that is strange.
- roxolotl 1y ago
  It’s such an anachronistic statement I laughed out loud reading your comment. I even was taught that you can’t pass things mid air. You place the potatoes down between each person required to pass them to the person who wants them.
  - jvanderbot 1y ago
    A non sequitur perhaps?
noobermin 1y ago
Americans are extremely polite, and American English is replete with niceties in everyday speech. It's funny, having been a tourist abroad, it's only living in a significantly non American country for a few years that lead me to realise this. I even lived in another country albeit a former US colony for ten years and didn't even notice it there given American influence. I stopped saying, stuff "I would like a latte today" or more Midwestern (could I get a latte today etc) in singapore because people would just get confused. Same with being too polite when recieving things. There's ways to be polite but it usually involves less words because anything else confuses people.

jezzamon 1y ago

I was thinking about this comparison recently along a slightly different axis: One challenge when working with translations (human or machine translations) as that you can't vet whether it's correct or not yourself. So you just have to either trust the translation and hope it's the best. It's a lot easier to trust a person than a machine, though I have had someone message me once to say "this translation of your article is so bad I feel like the translator did not put in a serious attempt" It's similar to vibe coding where the user truly doesn't know how to create the same thing themselves: You end up with output that you have no way of knowing it's correct, and you just have to blindly trust it and hope for the best. And that just doesn't work for many situations. So you still need expertise anyway (either yours or someone else's)

stevage 1y ago
Well no, you can run the output. That gives you some measure of correctness.
- danpalmer 1y ago
  No I think the original comment is correct. You need to be able to evaluate the result. The goal of software is not to compile and run, it's to solve a problem for the user when running. If you don't know enough about the problem to be able to assess the output of the program then you can't trust that it's actually doing the right thing. I've seen code generated by LLMs that runs, does something, and that the something would be plausible to a layperson, but that I know from domain knowledge and knowing the gotchas involved in programming that it's not actually correct. I think the comparison with translation is a very apt one.
eurleif 1y ago
You can kinda validate machine translation by doing a circular translation, A->B->A. It's not a perfect test, but it's a reasonably strong signal.
- ruszki 1y ago
  I’m learning German, and I quite often use this test. Google Translate fails this most of the times. This is true even between Hungarian and English. The difference with the latter one is, that I can properly choose between the options given to me, if there are, without translating it back. Especially, that that passed many times when it gave terrible translations. So this test fails many times, and even when not, the translation is still usually not good. However, when you don’t care about nuances, it’s still fine usually. And also translation seems to be better if the text is larger. Translating a single word does almost always fail. Translating a whole article is usually fine. But even there it matters what you translate. Translating the Austrian subreddit fails quite often. Sometimes completely for whole large posts. Translating news is better.

autobodie 1y ago

"Behold the impeccable nuance of my opinion"

Kiro 1y ago

> I see claims from one side that “I used $LLM_SERVICE_PROVIDER to make a small throwaway tool, so all programmers will be unemployed in $ARBITRARY_TIME_WINDOW”, and from the other side flat-out rejections of the idea that this type of tool can have any utility. No, the one side is saying that all their code is written by LLMs already and that's why they think that. In fact, I would say the other side is the former ("it works for throwaway code but that's it") and that no-one is flat-out rejecting it.

banq 1y ago

LLM=Google Translate +Context

DidYaWipe 1y ago

Hopefully it tells everyone to never use this douchey term again.

camillomiller 1y ago

>> For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s inconceivable that some future form of AI could handle context and ambiguity as well as humans do, but I do think we’re at least one more AI winter away from that, especially considering that today’s AI moguls seem to have no capacity for nuance, and care more about their tools appearing slick and frictionless than providing responsible output. Fantastic closing paragraph! Loved the article

Seanambers 1y ago

Prompting and context solves this.

nottorp 1y ago

There was a fun one on OSNews: https://www.osnews.com/story/142469/that-time-ai-translation-almost-caused-a-fight-between-a-doctor-and-my-parents/ https://www.osnews.com/story/142469/that-time-ai-translation...

yoden 1y ago

Machine translation is a great example. It's also where I expect AI coding assistants to land. A useful tool, but not some magical thing that is going to completely replace actual professionals. We're at least one more drastic change away from that, and there's no guarantee anyone will find it any time soon. So there's not much sense in worrying about it. A very similar story has been happening in radiology for the past decade or so. Tech folks think that small scale examples of super accurate AIs mean that radiologists will no longer be needed, but in practice the demand for imaging has grown while people have been scared to join the field. The efficiencies from AI haven't been enough to bridge the gap, resulting in a radiologist _shortage_.

Workaccount2 1y ago
Just a note on the radiologist part, the current SOTA radiology AI is still tiny parameter CNN's from the mid-late 2010's running locally. NYT ran an article a few weeks about this, and the entire article uses the phrase "A.I.", which people assume means ChatGPT, but really can refer to anything in the last 60 years of A.I. research. Manually digging revealed it was an old architecture. We don't know yet how a modern transformer trained on radiology would perform, but it almost certainly would be dramatically better.
- TechDebtDevin 1y ago
  That wouldnt be that much different than current CNN/labeling methods used on medical imaging. Last time I got a ct scan the paperwork had the workstation specs and the models/nueral network techniques used.
- demosthanos 1y ago
  > We don't know yet how a modern transformer trained on radiology would perform, but it almost certainly would be dramatically better. Why? Is there something about radiology that makes the transformer architecture appropriate? My understanding has been that transformers are great for sequences of tokens, but from what little I know of radiology sequence-of-tokens seems unlikely to be a useful representation of the data.

p3rls 1y ago

I just posted that Google is translating words that should be translated like "bastard" in foreign pop music (in this case, a member of the most popular boy band in the world, BTS) as racial slurs like the n-word. This is pretty much the worst case error scenario for a translation service. https://kpopping.com/news/2025/Jun/17/Google-Translation-of-BTS-Suga-s-Daechwita-Lyrics-Displays-Racial-Slur https://kpopping.com/news/2025/Jun/17/Google-Translation-of-... It's amazing more people aren't talking about this stuff, how incompetent do you have to be to allow racial slurs in translation, especially with all the weights towards being pro-diversity etc that already exist? Just more enshittification from ol Sundar and the crew

insane_dreamer 1y ago

I've done freelance translation in two different language pairs, for 20 years (mostly as a side thing). A few thoughts on this: - Google Translate has always been garbage for professional translation work, which is why human translators have been needed. - LLMs can write in a way that sounds native (at least in English), which is something that ML translation software was bad at. They can also understand context to some degree and can adopt tones. This is a huge leap forward that makes it suitable for a large majority of translation work _between common language pairs_ (Hindi to Thai is probably safe). - The vast majority of translation work is commercial in nature, and most cases, "decent" is good enough. Cost is prioritized over occasional mistakes. Prices have been falling for years already. Many agencies now pay peanuts because they expect you to use AI and "just" do some light proofreading. Except that often the "light proofreading" was actually "heavy editing" that often took more work than translating from scratch. It's not worth it. - Do not lump translators and interpreters together when discussing this subject. Interpreters aren't going away and their job is much more difficult to replace with AI (for a variety of reasons). What they do is very different than translators (some do both of course). - There are some exceptions to "decent is good enough", where: 1) context/localization is critical (a major advertising campaign), 2) accuracy of the message is critical (a government pronouncement), 3) linguistic excellence is critical (a novel). This may be the most visible parts, but also a very small fraction of the overall market. My conclusion is that translators won't disappear altogether but their ranks will shrink considerably.

voxleone 1y ago

>>For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s inconceivable that some future form of AI could handle context and ambiguity as well as humans do, Absolutely! AI might get better at context, but there's still no substitute for a seasoned dev who’s had to untangle a 2 a.m. deployment gone wrong. As for vibe coders — hey, good vibes are great, but they won’t refactor a legacy monolith on their own.

coolpool 1y ago

I've just launched https://www.verbascan.com/ https://www.verbascan.com/ — it does context-aware photo translations. Still early (doesn’t ask questions yet), but even at this stage, it's clear how much better the results are when intent and nuance are factored in. Would love any feedback if you give it a try.