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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. Al

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.

tkgally 1y ago
> It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to ... ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text. Great ideas. I'll think about adding those features to the system in my next vibe-coding session. What I automated in the MVP I vibe-coded yesterday could all be done alone by a human user with access to the LLMs, of course. The point of such an app would be to guide people who are not familiar with the issues and intricacies of translation so that they can get better translations for their purposes. I have no intention to try to commercialize my app, as there would be no moat. Anyone who wanted to could feed this thread to Claude, ask it to write a starting prompt for Claude Code, and produce a similar system in probably less time than it took me.
aidenn0 1y ago
I'm bad with names, so for any Japanese literature, I need to take notes; it's not unusual to see one character referred to by 3 names. Then you might have 3 characters that are all referred to as Tanaka-san at different points in time.
numpad0 1y ago
Maybe we should stop using advanced and somewhat hand-wavy vocabulary like "context" for that. The thing is that the prompt has to be long enough. The word "potatoes" in context of a specific 500-page book has little ambiguity. Same word but extracted out of the same book and fed to a translator(human or machine) in isolation would be much more ambiguous. You probably don't need the whole book, but the solution space do reduce as you give translators more out of the content or how it's used in the original as well as in other parts of translations. It's similar to how GPS works. With one satellite, your location is precise as "on Earth, I guess". It gets more precise as you add more satellites that further and further reduce margins of errors.

tkgally 1y ago

> It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to ... ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text. Great ideas. I'll think about adding those features to the system in my next vibe-coding session. What I automated in the MVP I vibe-coded yesterday could all be done alone by a human user with access to the LLMs, of course. The point of such an app would be to guide people who are not familiar with the issues and intricacies of translation so that they can get better translations for their purposes. I have no intention to try to commercialize my app, as there would be no moat. Anyone who wanted to could feed this thread to Claude, ask it to write a starting prompt for Claude Code, and produce a similar system in probably less time than it took me.

aidenn0 1y ago

I'm bad with names, so for any Japanese literature, I need to take notes; it's not unusual to see one character referred to by 3 names. Then you might have 3 characters that are all referred to as Tanaka-san at different points in time.

numpad0 1y ago

Maybe we should stop using advanced and somewhat hand-wavy vocabulary like "context" for that. The thing is that the prompt has to be long enough. The word "potatoes" in context of a specific 500-page book has little ambiguity. Same word but extracted out of the same book and fed to a translator(human or machine) in isolation would be much more ambiguous. You probably don't need the whole book, but the solution space do reduce as you give translators more out of the content or how it's used in the original as well as in other parts of translations. It's similar to how GPS works. With one satellite, your location is precise as "on Earth, I guess". It gets more precise as you add more satellites that further and further reduce margins of errors.