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As a multilingual/multicultural human it’s been pretty weird witnessing what AI translation has been doing to regional languages & cultures on the internet in t
by gyomu 1y ago
As a multilingual/multicultural human it’s been pretty weird witnessing what AI translation has been doing to regional languages & cultures on the internet in the last few years.
Sure we had machine translation before, but it was still a little off. Now the latest language models get us 99.9% there, so they are judged good enough to deploy at scale. What results is a weird twilight zone where everything is in your language, except it feels kind of wrong and doesn’t really communicate in ways specific to the culture from which the language is.
You’re in France, you search for something, a thread pops up with everyone interacting in French - seems reasonable enough, but it just reads kind of weird? Then a message is entirely out of place, and you realize that you’re reading an English language thread translated to French.
Or your mom sends you a screenshot of a Facebook thread in her native language that has her worked up - and reading it, you realize it’s an LLM translation of something that should have no bearing on her.
Same with various support pages on websites - it all reads mostly fine until you hit a weird sentence where the LLM messed up and then you’re transported back to the reality that what you’re reading was not authored by anyone who can actually operate in that language/culture.
There’s a lot of nuance in language beyond the words - how you express disagreement in English is not how you express disagreement in Japanese, how you address the reader in French is not the same as in Korean, etc. Machine translation flattens all modes of expression into a weird culturally en-US biased soup (because that’s where the companies are headquartered and where the language models are trained).
I have no illusions that this trend will reverse - high quality translation work is skill and time consuming, and thanks to LLMs anyone on Earth can now localize anything they want in any language they want for ~free in ~0 time.
The weirdest part is seeing this bubble up to the real world. I’ve been hearing young people use turns of phrases/expressions that I recognize as distinctly American, except not in English.
The classic linguist response to this, which I subscribe to, is “no language is fixed, language is ever evolving in response to various external cultural pressures“. Which is true. But it doesn’t make our post-LLM language landscape any less weird.
- daemoens 1y agoDo you have any examples of American expressions young generations are using in French?
- gyomu 1y agoThe ones that are easiest to point to are turns of phrase like “living your best life”, “that feeling when you…”, etc.
- avadodin 1y agoI don't think the LLMs are to blame here. Not yet, at least. This is caused by people active in English-speaking communities translating memes literally and spreading them in their native language communities as-is. As the meme spreads, monolingual speakers begin using the same format and eventually they reference it off-line.
- int_19h 1y agoNot really. I have observed the same thing in Russian, and no, it's not for expressions that are translated literally. Having said that, SOTA models got much better at this kinda stuff. They're quite able to write in a way that is indistinguishable from a native speaker, colloquialisms and all, with the right prompting. But SOTA models are also expensive. Most automated translations are done with something way cheaper and worse.
- Jach 1y agoThat's basically my complaint about all these AI translations being shoved around in places. If they were better, I'd complain less. I suppose they'll get better eventually, but that's not really guaranteed. Google Translate is still somehow terrible and has stagnated for a long time -- things got a little bit better with DeepL but now SOTA LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT) are quite good (even if they still have quite some ways to go) and so far beyond the old stuff, and allow you to actually discuss the translation itself with nuances kept/lost rather than just a straight one-shot A to B.
- int_19h 1y agoReasoning models are pretty interesting for this because they can iterate on the translation to get the subtle parts (like tone) right, especially if you prompt them to do so specifically.
- latentsea 1y agoI'm a native English speaker fluent in Japanese, recently moved to Japan this year. The one that really gets me lately is YouTube now automatically dubbing over content in Japanese that was originally in English. It's... so uncanny.
- jogu 1y agoI'm in a similar situation. I really wish there was a way to stop YouTube from suggesting me auto-dubbed videos.
- FeteCommuniste 1y agoYou can use the YouTube No Translation add-on to automatically turn off the robodubs and translated titles: https://youtube-no-translation.vercel.app/ https://youtube-no-translation.vercel.app/
- cubefox 1y agoYeah, that is a massive problem. This can't be disabled by the user, only be the channel owner. It's awful. The only solution is switching the YouTube UI language to English, to get the original English audio track. But then, presumably, all other languages would get machine translated into English. There is nothing one can do.
- numpad0 1y agoThereShouldBeTheQuoteAudioTrackQuoteOptionUnderGearIconMenuAtTheRightBottomCornerOfVideoUserInterfaceAmongWhichEnglishIsOfCourseNearTheBottomOfTheListButNotQuiteTheLastItem but it only applies to that specific video, and yeah, it makes no sense that this passed sniff tests for Google.
- rjh29 1y agoIt's a problem for everyone who speaks >1 language (the majority of the world?) since you can't turn it off.
- FeteCommuniste 1y ago
- amdsn 1y agoYeah it's really jarring to be reading a text in not-english that seems somewhat normal and then to trip over some extremely American reference that makes it obvious it was auto translated. I just want things to have explicit language toggles or maybe allow me to hover over some text to see the translation. Google even allows you to set multiple languages and they still insist on auto translation between 2 languages I have told them I know.
- CGamesPlay 1y agoThe global trend might not reverse, but surely the people in those cultures are going to push back on low quality content and "the market will sort it out", right? For example, Mistral is has a clear interest in being the "most native-French-speaking LLM", and with that expertise they could also grow to other languages where English-native LLMs are poorly received.
- jogu 1y agoI've really disliked Reddit's auto-translation. I'm bilingual (English & Japanese) and when I search for things only to get an auto-translated reddit thread it really is bizarre. The references, flow of the conversation, etc. are all just off and it feels weird.
- Jcampuzano2 1y agoBilingual English and Spanish here and I absolutely hate this. I can read both just fine. Platforms defaulting to always showing one or things like youtube auto-translating titles all to English or all to Spanish is frustrating because I always have to do the math in my head as to "Why does this thing I'm reading sound weird as hell" and realize its because it was lost in translation. Hell, I watch creators/consume content where the creator or writer themself speaks/writes interchangeably in both languages often within the same sentence because Spanglish is very common, and that just destroys most of these automated generators brains.
- sersi 1y agoI really hate it too especially when I want to search something specifically within the French context and I end up getting pages translated from Englsh to French and waste my time on irrelevant content.
- numpad0 1y agoUse `https://google .com/search?q=-tl%20%s` as your search engine in the browser. Adding "-tl" to search terms remove most translated results from Google Search results. For now anyways.
- j1436go 1y agoSame for German. It's horrible.
- o11c 1y ago> The weirdest part is seeing this bubble up to the real world. I’ve been hearing young people use turns of phrases/expressions that I recognize as distinctly American, except not in English. Calquing has been a common thing since long before AI translators, and it's not notable that it now happens for modern memes. It happens whenever a language is notable and nearby; English has a lot of calques from Greek/Latin/German/French as a result. Ironically, "calque" is a loanword, but "loanword" is a calque.
- joegibbs 1y agoHow do the models do if you ask them to translate to X language and adapt the text to suit cultural norms and idioms?
- SirHumphrey 1y agoAt least in my experience poorly. As a reference I speak one of the smaller European languages and what is interesting that newer models tend to do worse, but what all of them struggle with and is very hard to control using prompting is tone. Formal language in American English is very friendly, very sweet, to an extent that my language is not. Any piece of text therefore sounds like a psychopath is trying to manipulate you.
- totetsu 1y agoFWIW I recently was watching something that i did not realise had been auto translated from Chinese to English. It was kind of a technical topic, but still it seemed perfectly natural. It struck me that .. as much as conflict hawks and clash of culture theorists might want to do their best to construct an enemy, if we get past the disorientation of language barriers, then mostly people are the same. If AI translation can help with that its a benefit.
- numpad0 1y agoThe Standard Chinese language was always known to be oddly syntactically close to US English. No one calls it an Indo-European language, but they sometimes feel closer together than English and French on surface levels. Japanese is not like that - even human translations between anything to/from Japanese sound translated.
- mitthrowaway2 1y agoJapanese can especially be tricky to machine-translate because often the subject is missing from a sentence, where it would be required in an equivalent English sentence. The machine translation tends to insert its best guess of a subject (usually "I" or "you"), which can often flip a sentence's meaning inside-out.
- numpad0 11mo agoI'm thinking there's something deeper or wider than even that. Apparently there's something in Windows 11 right now that says "3 minutes 21 number 2", down to inclusion of the number, because, you know, seconds. I have my own essay on this matter to post on the Internet, but, to say the least, I don't think this mode of failures happen nearly as often in most other languages, if ever. 1: https://twitter.com/inasoft_ayacy/status/1986739607237722409 https://twitter.com/inasoft_ayacy/status/1986739607237722409
- Root_Denied 1y agoThere used to be a website called "Translation Party" where you would input a sentence in English and it would auto-translate it to Japanese and back to English over and over until it got to some equilibrium (where the translations were effectively the same) or hit it's upper bound of like 20 ish swings back and forth. It was a fun little tool, but I think that really drove home for me how different Japanese is from English in how it structures itself.
- imp0cat 1y agoYou’re in France, you search for something, a thread pops up with everyone interacting in French - seems reasonable enough, but it just reads kind of weird? Then a message is entirely out of place, and you realize that you’re reading an English language thread translated to French. There should be a word for this. Most of these translations feel so weird.
- krige 1y agoReminds me of the first time I heard youtube's forced AI translation to my native language. It's just wrong, the same male voice is used for everything, the delivery is grating, the intonation is off, the translation is very MTL in the bad sense. And it cannot be disabled on mobile. The numbers must go up, I guess, but in my case it greatly reduced my usage of the app.
- stOneskull 1y ago> a weird culturally en-US biased soup (because that’s where the companies are headquartered and where the language models are trained) i wonder why Sony doesn't train a Japanese model, or why some French company hasn't made a French one, etc.
- charlieyu1 1y agoMicrosoft nuked the default behaviour of the input method of Traditional Chinese that had been working for the last 50 years with a silent Windows Update