True! Consistency is definitely something they aren’t great at
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nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de 5 days agoIf you’re using it just to translate a few paragraphs of text on a website here or there, then yes, it’s much better than what we had before.
For anything complex however it can’t even begin to compare with a professionally done translation/localization. Japanese is one of the more difficult languages to localize due to a bunch of linguistic concepts that don’t translate well to other languages and need creative solutions that carry over the same intent.
More important however is consistency: Even if an AI translates some of the language ticks of the characters instead of completely glossing over them, it needs to do so consistently and apply the same translation across the whole script.
The same goes for any named items. If there’s a “Soul Stone” for example, you need to make sure to call it “Soul Stone” every single time and not “Spirit Rock”.
brown567@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Khrux@ttrpg.network 4 days ago
I 100% agree on consistency, but I actually suspect LLMs would be pretty decent at translating linguistic concepts. Their grasp of contextual language is always surprisingly good, as seen in how well they rewrite tone to very specific parameters.
I don’t use ChatGPT loads, but I do use it a little, often alongside a method of project that can’t hallucinate. The other week I was talking in one chat about the vocal tone of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, that has this laconic, worn down dialogue with old testament feeling prose. In another chat, I was prompting ‘sage advice’ for a matcha scone recipe I wanted to make where I was marbling strawberry directly into the dough. I got which chat I was responding in wrong and accidentally had it give me a the scone recipe in Cormac McCarthy’s writing style.
Now this is actually super easy to critique as a recipe, because it fucking sucks. In adaptation, it’s lost a lot of critical instruction. This is effectively a translation that must adhere to narrow and specific tone to achieve a meaning that cannot be translated without grasping a meaning to language that exists beyond the words.
Obviously this is English to English, but a big difference is that there is far more Japanese out there than Cormac McCarthy.
That being said, nothing cements what you’re saying about consistency more than how badly butchered the underlying instructions to this recipe are.