First AI Rejection Today - Machine Translation

[engelkuchkuch]

No one is arguing that you don't have the right to translate your story.

Laurel has the right to not publish it. You are free to publish it somewhere else.

--Annie

No one also arguing about the right of translating my story.

The reason I talk about it, because some people jumping to a conversation, mostly the don't read the conversation before. And only take the end of it. And creating a new context out of the original one.

I was talking about the legallity of AI TRANSLATION, cos Bramblethorn mentioned it. While beforehand, I was talking about the originallity.

And if you read the conversation beforehand I said:
First, I'm sure lit has considerations.
And they have to make decisions and boundaries that can't make everyone happy.
I'm not going to argue with them. I'm just giving them something to think about.
let's make that one clear first.

 

[engelkuchkuch]

No. A human translator can translate without ever having read a book. It might not be the best translation in the world, but someone who speaks two languages can theoretically translate from one into the other. Children who grow up in a bilingual environment translate between languages before they can read.

AI is little more than predictive text: "given these words, the next word is likely to be this."

Also, I wouldn't ascribe much value to whatever ChatGPT says about copyright.

Of course: The point is the human requires input from other sources to trasnlate.
Our mind is not shapped just by ourself, but by our environment.
The way we think, is not affected solely by ourself, but also by other people thoughts.
in that matter, will the translation of human illegal? Cos that person got the knowledge also from other human being?

And What about translator who also read books?
I'm sure people who translate in the context of written books, mostly read books.

You are right about chatgpt regarding copyright.
As mentioned in the TOS:
to the extent permitted by applicable law.
It is talking about rules/laws above chatgpt TOS regarding copyright.
That's why I copy paste the youtube video regarding the discussion about The Law above it.

 

[engelkuchkuch]

A human translator has learned their skill, not scraped it from the writing of others. An AI translator depends on the published content of others to learn the rules. It's not really comparable. In any event, this site doesn't publish AI derived or assisted content, so I'm afraid you're whipping a dead horse.

AI also need to learn. That's the way AI works. It also has to process. The different is with human, they are a lot faster. The process is similar to human, that's why they are called Artificial INTELLIGENT.

Changes start from a discussion.
Sure Lit has the final say.

What I'm arguing is the thought behind the rule.
Not the rule itself.
As I said before, and I copy paste it again :

First, I'm sure lit has considerations.
And they have to make decisions and boundaries that can't make everyone happy.
I'm not going to argue with them. I'm just giving them something to think about.
let's make that one clear first.

 

[iwatchus]

AI also need to learn. That's the way AI works. It also has to process. The different is with human, they are a lot faster. The process is the similar to human, that's why they are called Artificial INTELLIGENT.

It actually doesn't work much at all the way human intelligence works. It is not doing the same thing, simply faster. We do not simply memorize frequencies.

We synthesize as we consume. We build patterns and rules and learns from ones that others have built. LLMs are just giant correlation machines, regurgitating what they have consumed. Stochastic parrots not understanding what they are saying.

You say the AI's are faster. They consume information faster. They can pontificate more quickly. But they do not learn faster. They need far more data to do a much worse job.

Don't get caught up in the marketing hype, which is what the AI name has become.

 

[Voboy]

Changes start from a discussion.
Sure Lit has the final say.

No offense, but I've been here awhile and I've seen MANY newer posters say this exact same thing. It's almost never been borne out. Here? On this site? Changes DO NOT start from a discussion. Not a discussion in here, anyway.

I do not believe any of the discussions in the Authors' Hangout have ever led the site to even consider any changes whatsoever. This forum is notorious for its suggestions and discussions. Many of those are well-meant and well-reasoned.

They've never changed a single thing that I can think of.

 

[engelkuchkuch]

It actually doesn't work much at all the way human intelligence works. It is not doing the same thing, simply faster. We do not simply memorize frequencies.

We synthesize as we consume. We build patterns and rules and learns from ones that others have built. LLMs are just giant correlation machines, regurgitating what they have consumed. Stochastic parrots not understanding what they are saying.

You say the AI's are faster. They consume information faster. They can pontificate more quickly. But they do not learn faster. They need far more data to do a much worse job.

Don't get caught up in the marketing hype, which is what the AI name has become.

Well, good enough for translating at least from my language to English.
Cos not all human being can do that.

 

[engelkuchkuch]

No offense, but I've been here awhile and I've seen MANY newer posters say this exact same thing. It's almost never been borne out. Here? On this site? Changes DO NOT start from a discussion. Not here, anyway.

I do not believe any of the discussions in the Authors' Hangout have ever led the site to even consider any changes whatsoever. This forum is notorious for its suggestions and discussions. Many of those are well-meant and well-reasoned.

They've never changed a single thing that I can think of.

None taken.

Newbie here.
Well, I don't mind if they don't change.
Not hopping much.

I know how most forum works.
The owner is the "God"
They can do whatever they want.

Either write stories in English, use human translator or go somewhere else.

 

[StillStunned]

Well, good enough for translating at least from my language to English.
Cos not all human being can do that.

Unless you're a native speaker of English, you have no idea of whether the translation is "good enough".

I've mentioned before in this thread that I've been editing MT and AI translations for decades, and what they have in common is that the client almost always assumes that "all it needs is a bit of polishing". And they're always wrong.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Unless you're a native speaker of English, you have no idea of whether the translation is "good enough".

I've mentioned before in this thread that I've been editing MT and AI translations for decades, and what they have in common is that the client almost always assumes that "all it needs is a bit of polishing". And they're always wrong.

I use translation tools all the time and they really are quite literal. Once you tru transating from Chinese into English you realize just how far they have to go. They don't do idiom or slang well at all, the literal trans;ation can be so far from the real meaning that it's laughable - just as an example there's a cantonese phrase that translates luterally as "turtle's egg" but the actual meaning is more like "motherfucker" and there's a whole cultiral context and background to that translation at an AI tool or a translation tool has no way of understanding, as yet, anyhow.

I translate quite a bit from Ukrainian (whis is sort of close to Polish, which I know a little of) and even tho it's an Indo-European langage, the translation tools don;t get a lot of the context and idiom.

Here's an example from a Ukrainian song - literal translation is
"Step by step, shadow to shadow, Men-wolves went for a hunt" - "люди-вовки" (men-wolves) sounds cool in Slavic languages, but not so much in English

But contextually, the meaning is more liike
"Step by step, a shadow in the shadows, Wolf-soldiers go hunting."

Subtle differences

So yeah, unless you're a native speaker, you have no idea when the tool gets it wrong.

 

[StillStunned]

It's more than just that, though. There are simple things like homonyms. Take the word "host", for example. An army, a sacramental wafer, someone you visit. Or the act of having someone visiting you. Most languages will use different words for each of these concepts. An AI (or earlier MTs) can't sense which one the writer means.

And then there are synonyms. In business texts, you might come across sales, turnover and revenue. They all mean the same: units sold x selling price. But an AI or MT won't choose one and stick to it. It will use all three interchangeably. Same with profit and loss account, income statement and statement of income and expenditure. Companies generally pick one, based usually on the accounting system they (or their auditors) use. But when they're putting out a press release, the AI they use to translate it won't know which one to use. Or even that it's not done to mix them up.

And then there's the whole matter of flow. From what I've seen, DeepL and derived programs actually take most of their translations from a vast translation memory. That's a system that cuts texts up into sentences and attaches the relevant translation to each sentence. To generate a translation, the software looks for the closest match to the original, and puts in the attached translation.

What you get is something that's completely disjointed. There's no cohesion from one line to the next. It's awkward to read in a way that human translation isn't. And the problems of homonyms and synonyms are there too.

So AI/MT is perfectly fine if you just want to know what a text says. Even if it isn't perfect, most of us can figure out the general meaning, and have a laugh at the mistranslations. But if you present a text like that to someone who's paying you, they'll be insulted, angry, and looking for someone to replace you.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Of course: The point is the human requires input from other sources to trasnlate.
Our mind is not shapped just by ourself, but by our environment.
The way we think, is not affected solely by ourself, but also by other people thoughts.
in that matter, will the translation of human illegal? Cos that person got the knowledge also from other human being?

And What about translator who also read books?
I'm sure people who translate in the context of written books, mostly read books.

A human learns from external sources, and an AI learns from external sources, but there are vast differences in how they learn and what they learn. Arguing that they should be treated the same because they both get information from other sources is unhelpfully reductive; it's like arguing that we should treat surgeons the same as serial killers, because they both cut people open with knives.

 

[Writer61]

Unless you're a native speaker of English, you have no idea of whether the translation is "good enough".

Exactly. That is why translators usually work into their mother tongue.