Few industries have been hit by AI as hard as translation. Rates are plummeting. Work is drying up. Translators are considering abandoning the field, or bankruptcy. These are their stories.
LLM gets 95% of the translation done, but the 5% is likely every important and it takes longer to confirm it’s correct than to do it from scratch anyway
I’ve had to translate a whole bunch of letters from English to Finnish for my grandparents, and doing it using a translator saves a ton of time as I don’t have to actually produce the text, I can just read both sides afterwards and as long as every sentence matches in meaning, I can move to the next one.
But I wouldn’t trust it to actually be correct for the entire thing, because it never is, and if someone who doesn’t understand one of the languages would do it they would never spot the mistakes either.
How good is LLM training data for a language spoken by less than 10 million people? Keep in mind that most of those people are probably multilingual (i.e. categorizing which language is which by person is harder), and language itself is similar to its neighbors. And then, again, terms.
LLM gets 95% of the translation done, but the 5% is likely every important and it takes longer to confirm it’s correct than to do it from scratch anyway
I’ve had to translate a whole bunch of letters from English to Finnish for my grandparents, and doing it using a translator saves a ton of time as I don’t have to actually produce the text, I can just read both sides afterwards and as long as every sentence matches in meaning, I can move to the next one.
But I wouldn’t trust it to actually be correct for the entire thing, because it never is, and if someone who doesn’t understand one of the languages would do it they would never spot the mistakes either.
How good is LLM training data for a language spoken by less than 10 million people? Keep in mind that most of those people are probably multilingual (i.e. categorizing which language is which by person is harder), and language itself is similar to its neighbors. And then, again, terms.
I can not say, and wouldn’t trust it unless a translator confirmed its validity