Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

No surprise there... the worst problem for me is that translators go away as a business as the job opportunities vanish, and with them, the ability to translate stuff that requires cultural context to properly translate (jokes, puns, word plays).

We will be literally dumbing down as a species as a result.



Hmm, are you sure that translations of LLMs like ChatGPT are not incorporating cultural context?


Yes. Any bilingual person could tell you this.

For example, let's take the joke "What do you call the head of a school of fish? A Sardean" and translate it into Dutch.

Google Translate will give you "Hoe noem je de kop van een school vissen? Een Sardeaan." It's a mistranslation because "kop" explicitly means "head" as in the thing on your neck.

ChatGPT will give you "Hoe noem je het hoofd van een school vissen? Een Sardeaan." The first part now works, but the wordplay in "sardean" is still completely gone.

A proper translation does exist, for example "Hoe noem je het hoofd van een school vissen? Een direcsteur." In this case "directeur" is the translation of "director" and is a word commonly used for the person in charge of an instution. Similarly, "steur" is a type of fish - namely sturgeon. It's a pretty direct translation, but you need to be able to deal with wordplay to make it.

So no, ChatGPT translations do not properly incorporate context yet.


Bi-lingual people aren’t going away


Translations is a skill that no all bi-lingual people have. Most can hold a conversation, but that doesn't mean they can do a good translations.

A friend of mine was asked to translate in Church once, after wards he was told that polite people do not speak like that. (he really got fluent working as manager in a factory in a foreign country so you can imagine the language he learned from his peers).


When was the last time you hired a person to translate a book or movie for you?


There are supposedly a lot of government jobs for interpreters. If you receive any communications from an agency, it may have 2+ pages in different languages which explain your rights to receive translated materials and to request someone to interpret into your native language. The same with court proceedings.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: