| Pages sur ce sujet: [1 2] > | AI problems for linguists Auteur du fil: Ha Le
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Ha Le 
Vietnam
anglais vers vietnamien
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Good afternoon everybody,
Recently, I got some emails offering some review translation projects from genAI or AI companies or translation companies.
I refused them since I think that theses AI companies is linguist's near future bad friends.
What do you think about this?
| | | | Marcel Gomez
Pérou
Local time: 16:44
Membre
japonais vers espagnol
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| You can accept, but... | Aug 29, 2024 |
I guess we can consider this the same as MTPE.
In that case, I tell them that I will charge my normal standard rate for human translation, because of the reason that it is easier to translate a document from scratch than trying to fix MT (It also applies for poor HT).
Yes, I use MT in my projects because it provides me with suggestions and ideas, and sometimes it even makes me understand the contents better, but I usually delete the MT in the following step and write my... See more I guess we can consider this the same as MTPE.
In that case, I tell them that I will charge my normal standard rate for human translation, because of the reason that it is easier to translate a document from scratch than trying to fix MT (It also applies for poor HT).
Yes, I use MT in my projects because it provides me with suggestions and ideas, and sometimes it even makes me understand the contents better, but I usually delete the MT in the following step and write my own translation. I seldom try to fix or edit MT. That would be too time-consuming and stressful in my experience.
Or may it be that my post-editing approach is not good?
[Edited at 2024-08-29 16:43 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | James McVay
États-Unis
Local time: 16:44
russe vers anglais
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| The future of translation | Aug 29, 2024 |
Yes, I'm afraid you have been given a glimpse of our future.
As I slip into retirement, I've been experimenting with using generative AI as a translation assistant. I'm not as resistant to the idea as many freelance translators seem to be — perhaps because I'm on the verge of retirement.
I have found that, properly prompted, large language model AIs like ChatGPT and Claude Soprano 3.5 are perfectly capable of turning out human-level translations. I know that's not goi... See more Yes, I'm afraid you have been given a glimpse of our future.
As I slip into retirement, I've been experimenting with using generative AI as a translation assistant. I'm not as resistant to the idea as many freelance translators seem to be — perhaps because I'm on the verge of retirement.
I have found that, properly prompted, large language model AIs like ChatGPT and Claude Soprano 3.5 are perfectly capable of turning out human-level translations. I know that's not going to be a popular statement here. And, to be fair, it's not an accurate statement for all language pairs. However, it certainly seems to be true for my language pairs; I translate Russian and Bulgarian into English.
I have wondered how long it would take translation agencies to reach the same conclusion. Your post suggests that some now have. More will follow.
I think a few words about one of my experiments with AI for translation might illustrate my point.
I have recently been translating short stories written by a Russian friend who is also a translator. I used AI to produce the English translations of the first three stories posted here: https://valeriysherbakov.blogspot.com/2024/08/. The AI produced the translations in about a minute's time. All they needed was a light edit to clarify some cultural references and better explain some descriptions of physical actions. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say these translations are pretty good.
I'm producing translations for my friend as a favor — in other words, I'm not getting paid. That's why I leaned heavily on AI to produce all three of those translations, and I will continue doing that.
As I suggested above, the prompt used with an AI is important. Prompt engineers are making money selling their prompts. I'll share the one I used for the translations for free:
"Translate the following Russian short story into colloquial English suitable for publication. The translation should capture the essence and tone of the original while maintaining a natural, conversational style. Avoid overly formal language or archaic expressions. Aim for a lively, engaging narrative voice that resonates with contemporary readers."
I have found that literary translations from Russian to English produced using this prompt are perfectly acceptable as first drafts. In fact, while some revision is usually necessary, typically only minor changes are needed.
In the past, I always turned down jobs that involved post-editing of machine translations, usually translations done by Google Translate, DeepL, or a similar system. The fees offered did not compensate for the time required to fix the machine output. Use of AI has the potential for creating a new paradigm. The ball, as they say, is in the agencies' court. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Boris Smirnov
États-Unis
Local time: 16:44
Membre (2012)
russe vers anglais
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Hate to be that guy, but those story translations are about as good as AI generated images. On the other hand, I agree with you almost entirely: AI is useful for the majority of drudge work in translation.
[Edited at 2024-08-30 09:39 GMT]
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James McVay
États-Unis
Local time: 16:44
russe vers anglais
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| Some examples | Sep 2, 2024 |
Boris Smirnov wrote:
Hate to be that guy, but those story translations are about as good as AI generated images. On the other hand, I agree with you almost entirely: AI is useful for the majority of drudge work in translation.
[Edited at 2024-08-30 09:39 GMT]
I'm currently editing another story for my friend, so I thought I'd provide a few translation "gems" from Claude (incidentally, it's Sonnet, not Soprano as I wrote in my previous post). I'll let you decide if they are in natural English, or if they're "about as good as AI generated images."
1. Они работали на одном и том же заводе в смежных цехах, так что назначить время и место встречи не было большой проблемой даже в то время почти полного отсутствия домашних телефонов.
- They worked in adjoining departments at the same factory, so setting a time and place to meet wasn't a big deal, even back then when hardly anyone had a phone at home.
2. Я пошёл и заявил об этом тёте Кате. Вот ведь какой маленький мерзавец!
- I went and tattled to Aunt Katya. What a little snitch I was!
3. У него были интересные игрушки. Железная дорога с маленькими вагончиками.
- He had a cool toy: a toy train set with tiny cars.
4. Однажды он забыл пачку папирос у нас на подоконнике. Я вынул оттуда пару штук. На улице за каким-то забором я попробовал покурить. Долго кашлял и плевался. Отрава. Не понравилось.
- Once, he left a pack of cigarettes on our windowsill, and I snagged a couple. I tried smoking behind a fence outside. Ended up coughing and spitting for ages. Nasty stuff. Didn't like it one bit.
Perhaps more significantly, Claude accurately detected when the verbs should be in the past habitual tense. e.g., "The guests would stay for ages, not just an hour or two. "
But enough of that. You can see that the AI isn't just doing mechanical translations like Google Translate.
[Edited at 2024-09-02 16:59 GMT]
| | | | | As good as it gets | Sep 3, 2024 |
As long as you try to use AI for this kind of 'elementary school stories', it may turn out pretty good. Choppy primitive sentences, linear plot, etc. Why, you can't really spoil this kind of 'fiction', can you?
I wonder what AI would do if you feed it something by e.g. Andrei Platonov.
| | | | James McVay
États-Unis
Local time: 16:44
russe vers anglais
+ ...
| Challenge accepted | Sep 3, 2024 |
Evgeny Sidorenko wrote:
As long as you try to use AI for this kind of 'elementary school stories', it may turn out pretty good. Choppy primitive sentences, linear plot, etc. Why, you can't really spoil this kind of 'fiction', can you?
I wonder what AI would do if you feed it something by e.g. Andrei Platonov.
It takes a fair bit of nerve to disparage an author you've never read. But I'll accept your challenge...
Here is the first paragraph from Platonov's Счастливая Москва, followed by ChatGpt's translation.
Темный человек с горящим факелом бежал по улице в скучную ночь поздней осени. Маленькая девочка увидела его из окна своего дома, проснувшись от скучного сна. Потом она услышала сильный выстрел ружья и бедный грустный крик – наверно, убили бежавшего с факелом человека. Вскоре послышались далекие, многие выстрелы и гул народа в ближней тюрьме… Девочка уснула и забыла все, что видела потом в другие дни: она была слишком мала, и память и ум раннего детства заросли в ее теле навсегда последующей жизнью. Но до поздних лет в ней неожиданно и печально поднимался и бежал безымянный человек – в бледном свете памяти – и снова погибал во тьме прошлого, в сердце выросшего ребенка. Среди голода и сна, в момент любви или какой-нибудь молодой радости – вдруг вдалеке, в глубине тела опять раздавался грустный крик мертвого, и молодая женщина сразу меняла свою жизнь – прерывала танец, если танцевала, сосредоточенней, надежней работала, если трудилась, закрывала лицо руками, если была одна. В ту ненастную ночь поздней осени началась октябрьская революция – в том городе, где жила тогда Москва Ивановна Честнова.
A dark figure clutching a burning torch sprinted down the street on a dreary late autumn night. A little girl spotted him from the window of her house, having woken from a dull dream. Then she heard the sharp crack of a gunshot and a sorrowful, pitiful cry—someone had likely killed the torchbearer. Soon, distant gunfire echoed, and the murmur of a crowd could be heard from the nearby prison... The girl fell back asleep and eventually forgot everything she had witnessed as the days went by. She was too young, and the memories and thoughts of early childhood were buried forever by the life that followed. But even in her later years, a nameless figure would suddenly and sadly rise up and run through the pale light of her memory, only to perish again in the darkness of the past, deep within the heart of the child she once was. Whether in moments of hunger and sleep, love, or youthful joy—a sorrowful cry from the dead would sometimes echo from deep within her, and the young woman’s life would change in an instant. She would stop dancing if she were dancing, work with more focus and determination if she were working, or cover her face with her hands if she were alone. On that stormy late autumn night, the October Revolution began—in the very town where Moscow Ivanovna Chestnova lived at the time.
You might quibble about it's choice of glosses, but I think you'll have to agree it captured Platonov's style pretty well.
| | | | Lingua 5B
Bosnie-Herzegovine
Local time: 22:44
Membre (2009)
anglais vers croate
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| What does it mean to us | Sep 3, 2024 |
I don’t understand the examples, as I am not fluent in Russian. No point in throwing examples in every single post.
In my language pair, AI produces a very bad output. I tested/compared with GT, and GT is much better (no, I’m not going to throw examples to a bunch of audience who can’t understand Croatian).
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| I agree the English is pretty well-written | Sep 4, 2024 |
James McVay wrote:
You might quibble about it's choice of glosses, but I think you'll have to agree it captured Platonov's style pretty well
But that's what Chatty knows how to do: write naturally sounding sentences in English. It doesn't capture the style because whenever it sees something unusual, it arbitrarily changes its meaning (I noticed that many times). One thing that's special about Platonov's style is how he uses unusual word combinations, which were all lost in translation (and this passage is a lite version of Platonov). The crack of a gunshot may have been sharp, but the original text only mentions that it was intense as opposed to all things dreary/dull, which are actually the same word in the original—and the repetition matters. The collocation used to describe the sound is not normally seen in the wild (people were searching for new forms back then). The cry was neither pitiful nor sorrowful (you just won't cry with sorrow when being killed like that); instead, the two words convey the sense of weakness, lack of force, and the sad impression it all made. Chat decided that the fact that many shots were fired in the distance was not as impressive as echoes. We can all imagine a murmuring crowd, but the Russian word used there is interesting; English doesn't handle it well. It's usually a sound of something big and menacing heard from afar but filling all the space around you, not roaring, rumbling, or murmuring. Since the inmates may have been quite loud, I'd say what could be heard through the walls should have sounded like a giant bee-hive. Muffled clamoring noise. It's easy to see that "buried forever" was amiss there: an important point was that, by and by, the memories and mental formations from that time were healed inside her body as layers of new life kept growing on top of them. These are just a few observations about a translation of a relatively simple text. They are all for explanation purposes; I wasn't offering any translation solutions. ChatGPT can mess things up a lot more as my tests have shown
| | | | James McVay
États-Unis
Local time: 16:44
russe vers anglais
+ ...
| Please try to understand where I’m coming from | Sep 4, 2024 |
Lingua 5B wrote:
I don’t understand the examples, as I am not fluent in Russian. No point in throwing examples in every single post.
In my language pair, AI produces a very bad output.
I was actually replying to Mr. Sidorenko, who I felt was commenting from ignorance. Most — maybe all — of these LLM AIs are unavailable in his country.
If you read my first comment, you will see that I actually state that these LLM AIs don’t perform equally well in all language pairs. In fact, they perform best when translating into English and less well when going in the other direction. That is because their training, to this point at least, has been mainly in English. I would actually be surprised if any of them did a good job either translating into Croatian, for one example, or writing in Croatian.
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It takes a fair bit of nerve to call ignorant somebody you don't know nothing about.
As for your dsitinguished author friend, I've read enough to repeat - this kind of 'literature' can't be be spoiled by any AI. As for AP, "Счастливая Москва" is relatively easy written, comparing to most of his other works. Unpublished in his lifetime, actually, as it was unfinished. Strange choice from my viewpoint, but you are of course free to pick only bits proving your statement. I wa... See more It takes a fair bit of nerve to call ignorant somebody you don't know nothing about.
As for your dsitinguished author friend, I've read enough to repeat - this kind of 'literature' can't be be spoiled by any AI. As for AP, "Счастливая Москва" is relatively easy written, comparing to most of his other works. Unpublished in his lifetime, actually, as it was unfinished. Strange choice from my viewpoint, but you are of course free to pick only bits proving your statement. I was thinking about some harder passages, but as indicated by another colleague, no good in throwing examples understood by only a few readers.
As for "capturing the style", I'm too much of a fan of AP to even consider actually reading him in any other languages than Russian. Just makes no sense to me. This goes for any fiction translation, of course, for any language.
PS. One thing I can give to MT and AI: it will never confuse its and it's as humans (even native speakers) do (and you did).
[Редактировалось 2024-09-04 05:35 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | | The main point of this short abstract is completely mistranslated. | Sep 4, 2024 |
The abstract is meant to convey that, in response to disturbing childhood memories, the woman would take immediate steps to change her actions. However, the translation of “молодая женщина сразу меняла свою жизнь” as “the young woman’s life would change in an instant” does not accurately reflect its meaning.
[Edited at 2024-09-04 21:36 GMT]
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James McVay
États-Unis
Local time: 16:44
russe vers anglais
+ ...
| More thoughts | Sep 5, 2024 |
Svetlana Podgorska wrote:
The abstract is meant to convey that, in response to disturbing childhood memories, the woman would take immediate steps to change her actions. However, the translation of “молодая женщина сразу меняла свою жизнь” as “the young woman’s life would change in an instant” does not accurately reflect its meaning.
[Edited at 2024-09-04 21:36 GMT]
I’m not going to argue literary interpretation. People tend to have different interpretations of the same work of literature. I would like to point out, however, that the translation is grammatically accurate, even to appropriately rendering an English verb tense that Russian lacks — here, for instance:
“Whether in moments of hunger and sleep, love, or youthful joy—a sorrowful cry from the dead would sometimes echo from deep within her, and the young woman’s life would change in an instant. She would stop dancing if she were dancing, work with more focus and determination if she were working, or cover her face with her hands if she were alone.”
The verbs are in the habitual past. “Would” can also be used to express the conditional, of course, but that’s not its function here. And let me hasten to say that the Russian imperative is not same as the English habitual past. The English habitual past only refers to recurring past actions, whereas the Russian imperative past is more ambiguous. It can describe either recurring past events or continuing past actions.
[Edited at 2024-09-05 02:36 GMT]
| | | | James McVay
États-Unis
Local time: 16:44
russe vers anglais
+ ...
James McVay wrote:
And let me hasten to say that the Russian imperative is not same as the English habitual past. The English habitual past only refers to recurring past actions, whereas the Russian imperative past is more ambiguous. It can describe either recurring past events or continuing past actions.
[Edited at 2024-09-05 02:36 GMT]
I thought I fixed that “imperative” error, but it didn’t take. Autocorrect on my phone doesn’t seem to know about the Russian imperfect aspect.
| | | | | I completely agree | Sep 27, 2024 |
I completely agree with your concerns about AI companies in the translation industry. While AI can be a useful tool for certain tasks, it often lacks the nuanced understanding and cultural sensitivity that human translators bring to the table. Accepting projects that rely heavily on AI could undermine the value of our expertise as linguists.
Best
Tala
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