The fact that this was machine translated was surprising as it was remarkably readable! Interesting how far that tech has come while I wasn’t looking.
dwood_dev · 1h ago
LLMs are quite good at translation. You can even instruct them to use different linguistic styles and regional idioms.
They are also quite good at translating poorly written and only semi coherent writing, which can be incredibly useful if the person you are communicating with is quite sloppy.
AnotherGoodName · 48m ago
To be clear, it's the original purpose of LLMs.
The whole LLM scene today came about because context was really important to translations. The "attention is all you need" paper was by the Google Translation team as they came up with ideas to improve how to map context of words and carry them across in translations.
At some point people started asking the translation to "translate from English to English as if you're an AI assistant".
Anyway it shouldn't surprise anyone that LLMs are good at translation. The real surprise to everyone is how powerful translation engines that understood context could be!
userbinator · 1h ago
I read your comment after the article and didn't believe it. JP>EN is one of the trickiest pairs for MT and there are usually interesting phrases, understandable but distinctive, that would appear even if an actual human did it.
Pfiffer · 1h ago
It was originally written in french
userbinator · 44m ago
That makes sense, FR>EN is far easier and even Google Translate has been doing a decent job of that for a long time.
https://infinitemac.org/1996/KanjiTalk%207.5.3
They are also quite good at translating poorly written and only semi coherent writing, which can be incredibly useful if the person you are communicating with is quite sloppy.
The whole LLM scene today came about because context was really important to translations. The "attention is all you need" paper was by the Google Translation team as they came up with ideas to improve how to map context of words and carry them across in translations.
At some point people started asking the translation to "translate from English to English as if you're an AI assistant".
Anyway it shouldn't surprise anyone that LLMs are good at translation. The real surprise to everyone is how powerful translation engines that understood context could be!