Are AI Models Advanced Enough To Translate Literature? The Debate Is Roiling Publishing: Major publishers are experimenting with automated translations, hundreds of which have already been produced.

Comments

• arararagi@ani.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Considering all the rewrites with unsolicited modern western politics happening when japanese games are translated nowadays, I’m sure some people must be rejoicing with this news.

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• CatladyX@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I studied translation in college, and sometimes I’ll do translation work as a freelancer. In my opinion it’s really hard for a machine to get the intricacies of translation. it’s not just “convert” from one language to another, there are linguistic devices people use to make writing more “interesting”.

  I’ll give two examples

  I read this book called Blue Belle in both English (original language) and Portuguese (translation). there’s this bit on the original where the protagonist Belle says

  If I were a flower I’d be a bluebell

  in Portuguese they just translated the name of the flower into “campanula”. the word trick was completely lost.

  another case is that joke “why is 6 afraid of 7? because 7 8 9”. it’s untranslatable into Portuguese, for instance. there’s no way to translate the sound of “seven eight/ate nine”…

  a human translator will try to find a way to at least explain it to the reader, sometimes via a footnote, but a machine won’t be able to do it

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  • Hugin@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    To be fair a lot of human translators don’t bother to be accurate or capture wordplay. Some of the translations for netflix are so bad.

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    • CatladyX@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      you’re right, there are translators and translators

      that’s why there are expressions such as “traduttore, traditore” (translator, traitor in Italian). to translate is to betray the language in a way

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• technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  No. “AI” models are not that advanced because “AI” doesn’t exist.

  However I’m sure there are plenty of translation algorithms that would do any ok job with books.

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• brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I use local instances of Aya 32B (and sometimes Deepseek, Qwen, LG Exaone, Japanese finetunes, others depending on the language) to translate stuff, and it is quite different than Google Translate or any machine translation you find online. They get the “meaning” of text instead of transcribing it robotically like Google, and are actually pretty loose with interpretation.

  It has soul… sometimes too much. That’s the problem: It’s great for personal use where it can ocassionally be wrong or flowery, but not good enough for publishing and selling, as the reader isn’t necessarily cognisant of errors.

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  • arararagi@ani.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I guess that’s why I saw someone call them “dazed translations”, these models start doing poetry halfway through.

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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Or a tool for the translator to save time?

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  • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Actually, as to your edit, the it sounds like you’re fine-tuning the model for your data, not training it from scratch. So the llm has seen english and chinese before during the initial training. Also, they represent words as vectors and what usually happens is that similiar words’ vectors are close together. So subtituting e.g. Dad for Papa looks almost the same to an llm. Same across languages. But that’s not understanding, that’s behavior that way simpler models also have.

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      True! Models not trained on a specific language are generally bad at that language.

      However, there are some exceptions, like a Japanese tune of Qwen 32B which dramatically enhances it Japanese, but the training has to be pretty extensive.

      And even that aside… the effect is still there. The point it to illustrate that LLMs are sort of “language independent” internally, like you said.

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  • br3d@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    These language models don’t get the meaning of anything. They predict the next cluster of letters based on the clusters of letters that have come before. Sorry, but if it feels to you like they’re captured the meaning of something, you’re being bamboozled

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s a metaphor.

      They’re translating the input tokens to intent in the model’s middle layers, which is a bit more precise.

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• Euphoma@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’ve spent years reading shitty machine translations of novels, its incomparable to something that a human translated

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• jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Even with humans, there are good translations and bad translations.

  Some of my favorite authors did not natively write in English and the translators did a stellar job of capturing the nuance of the original.

  I can’t imagine AI giving anything other than a straight denotative translation. It would be readable, but with no soul.

  Here’s a passage from Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s “The Shadow of the Wind” in Spanish (“La sombra del viento”):

  “En una ocasión oí comentar a un cliente habitual en la librería de mi padre que pocas cosas marcan tanto a un lector como el primer libro que realmente se abre camino hasta su corazón. Aquellas primeras imágenes, el eco de esas palabras que creemos haber dejado atrás, nos acompañan toda la vida y esculpen un palacio en nuestra memoria al que, tarde o temprano —no importa cuántos libros leamos, cuántos mundos descubramos, cuánto aprendamos u olvidemos—, vamos a regresar. Para mí, esas páginas embrujadas siempre serán las que encontré entre los pasillos del Cementerio de los Libros Olvidados.”

  The English translation:

  “Once, in my father’s bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later - no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget - we will return. For me those enchanted pages will always be the ones I found among the passageways of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”

  Google translate:

  “I once heard a regular customer at my father’s bookstore comment that few things leave a lasting impression on a reader as much as the first book that truly makes its way into their heart. Those first images, the echo of those words we think we’ve left behind, stay with us for a lifetime and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, how much we learn or forget—we will return. For me, those haunted pages will always be the ones I found in the aisles of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”

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  • RamblingPanda@lemmynsfw.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    A lot of technical documentation is translated automatically. I’m German, so most sites will give me the German translation. And more often than not, I struggle to understand even the basics of what they talk about. Until I switch to English, the original language.

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  • taladar@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Agreed. Even human translations are usually crap 99% of the time if they are done as pure surface level translations without having someone who understands the original in depth essentially rewrite it in the target language.

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