• @Snowclone@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Oh man is translation not possible with AI. You have no idea how little languages have in common. A lot of terms don’t mean a thing, but combine concepts you don’t have or associate to point at a thing.

    My dad said, about learning a new language, ‘‘cat means cat, not gato, don’t translate’’ and I think that holds up pretty well from my experience.

    • KillingTimeItself
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      53 days ago

      Oh man is translation not possible with AI.

      i mean, it’s pretty good at it? A lot of human translators even struggle with the same problem, the AI is just a lot faster, and significantly more versatile. That’s arguably one of it’s strongest areas of performance, is translation, because it’s so well suited to it.

      • @Snowclone@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        You think it’s OK because it spits out grammatically correct language on your end, but if you spoke both languages you’d get how it fails. Look at translations of Korean comics if you’d like to see how badly mechanical translation is when it’s a connected story across multiple chapters, I was reading a comic where a character said he liked the elegant and sophisticated sound of calling a lightning strike skill ‘‘bolt’’ instead of whatever he was calling it ‘‘lighting strike’’ I think. It took me a while to realize what or whoever translated it didn’t know how to look at the context of the translation and find a English word that English speakers would find at least old fashioned if not archaic and of course longer or more poetic sounding. It’s like the whole thing when JRPGs can’t figure out if they should localize names by just spelling out the phonetic sounds in Roman letters or actually translating the meaning of the name, or a thing no one’s ever done and find a name in a European language family that has the same meaning.

        Just like the AI art, it’s not replacing good translation, it’s replacing hack job translations, it’s replacing mediocre and predictable art. I really don’t care if someone uses AI in the pre-production or some post production functions, just not the part you need a human for, the actual creativity, there’s an adage in 3D animation ‘‘it you let the computer do it, it’s gonna suck.’’ You can let the computer do inbetweens, but you better be giving it nothing near a key frame. It has to really be the very least important frames.

        • KillingTimeItself
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          118 hours ago

          i know extremely well the limitations of it, i’m just saying that it has utility, and very clearly provides a useful service.

          Certainly better than hiring a translator privately to read something you’re moderately curious about, or to talk with one person. Though if you’re professionally translating something, you should obviously hire someone for it.

      • Gibibit
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        43 days ago

        AI currently completely does not understand the context of translation when it comes to visual media. Whereas a human translator can use that for additional interpretation

        • KillingTimeItself
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          118 hours ago

          this is a pretty big limitation, but i think you would struggle a lot, using an AI to translate something like that, as opposed to a text block, which is mostly what it’s used for these days. It serves a purpose, i’m not saying it should replace professional translators, i just think people don’t necessarily realize there are two primary blocks of usage for these things.

      • @itslola@lemmy.world
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        43 days ago

        It’s still doing a consistently poorer job than a skilled translator, because it has no concept of nuance or tone. I encounter people getting themselves worked up over information in AI-translated news articles, so I go back to the source material and discover it’s mistranslated, under-translated, or just completely omitted parts of sentences. It’s very Purple Monkey Dishwasher.

        The quality is better than it was a decade ago, sure, but that’s a pretty low bar. Back then it was gibberish, nowadays it’s natural-sounding phrases with incorrect translations.

        • KillingTimeItself
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          23 days ago

          this is true, but for the average person, who just wants to translate something to make it make somewhat sense, it’s great.

          Though yeah, you can’t really trust it, there’s a lot of intricacies.

        • KillingTimeItself
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          018 hours ago

          i’ve used the internet before bro, i think im pretty well educated on this one. Most people know more than one language, lol.

    • @HiddenLychee@lemmy.world
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      33 days ago

      I mean given that “AI” are language models built on context and relations between words I’d argue that that’s one of the more applicable jobs compared to what’s listed in OP. With none of them is it capable of doing well, but I just wouldn’t argue that translation is outside that realm of what’s listed above