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Comment by creesch | Hacker News Reader

Their translation is still substantially better than what most LLMs can offer. Certainly for languages where LLMs have very little training data for.

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I've used chatgpt to translate into one the local dialects here - very impressed. DeepL is OK if you know the language you're translating to - and knowing which alternative words work better in the translation.

IMO, the quality of the translations has dropped significantly. When they first launched it was noticeably better than almost anything else. Now it's comparable to the alternatives. And I don't think the alternatives got that better, it's DeepL that is not as good anymore.

I still use it for most of the translations I need (mostly English <> German). And sometimes I have to check the translation because it can mess up the actual meaning of the sentence. Sometimes I can catch it with my limited German, sometimes I run it through another translator. And it "hallucinates" often enough, unfortunately.

I will disagree here. I found ChatGPT better at English <-> German translation than DeepL. Especially at translating slang and online speak where DeepL would shit the bed.

I found that specifically when it comes to proper flow and grammatical rules, chatGPT and other LLMs tend to break down. Certainly when translating from English to another language. From another language to English often goes a lot better, but that really depends on how much training data in that language the LLM has been trained on.

German would be one of the languages where LLMs likely will perform fairly well, as it is one of the languages that LLMs training data often contains quite a lot of.

With DeepL if I am using it to translate a language I am not too familiar with and can't validate the outcome as well I therefore will have more trust in its translation. Because I know that the languages they support are actually specifically implemented for translation reasons.

I can't say for en <-> de, I can read both without problem. But for Japanese DeepL is much better, often times the tone from gpt4 are little bit "rude"/direct or "weird" in en to jp, deepl is as good as an example sentence they would put into a textbook. For jp to en, most gpt4 or any llm is much superior, because you can ask follow up questions on certain slangs, or anything that's not very clear.

Doesn't DeepL use an LLM? At least based on the company name that's what I would assume

It is(at least was) pre-LLM deep learning NLP. So was Google Translate, and those two as well as LLMs all has their unique forte and failure modes.

Sometimes: https://support.deepl.com/hc/en-us/articles/14241705319580-N...

To be fair, top-of-the-line proprietary models suck at i18n. Try gemma-27b it's much better

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