Brood War Korean Translations | Hacker News Reader

Brood War Korean Translations

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314 pointstodsacerdoti102 comments

This was an fun read, as someone who's both a Korean BW player and a speech recognition researcher.

It's interesting to note that the original Korean transcription already has many errors, seemingly (and impressively) corrected by LLMs later on. For example, 12 안마당 빌드 (12 courtyard build) is actually 12 앞마당 빌드 (12 frontyard build), which might have been more understandable to BW players. Similarly 투에처리 빌드 (processing-at-two build? makes no sense lol) should have been transcribed 투해처리 빌드 (two-Hatchery build).

Therefore it may also be helpful to directly feed the slang dictionary into Whisper's inference process using contextual biasing. There are lots of ways to do this, but the simplest would be to increase the probability of slang words in the dictionary in the final prediction layer of Whisper by a constant factor. This is fairly easy to implement, for example by using HuggingFace's library: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/internal/generat...

Do they actually use the Korean word for, like, tossing something to refer to the Protoss? That’s a pretty funny cross-language pun if so.

Haha, no I acutually never associated this with the English word toss lol.

Half of the words in the Korean blurb are just romanizations. Even build is just bil-deu

No, Protoss is just 토스, which is just hangulization of "Toss" aka Protoss.

I am a StarCraft fan and I have no idea what a courtyard or a frontyard is supposed to be! However I do know that the names of buildings, units, technologies, and strategies are usually heavily abbreviated in English. Perhaps the same is true in Korean? A 12 barracks build would usually just be called "12 rax", a two hatchery mutalisk build would be called "2 hatch muta", and a three hatchery hydralisk timing attack / all-in would be called "3 hatch hydra bust".

I believe the equivalent term used in English (exhibited in the new translation) is "natural", short for "natural expansion", which refers to the obvious location where the player should build their first expansion. It sounds like the term used in Korean for this concept literally means "front yard" rather than matching the English term.

Makes sense. And presumably the 12 means that you expand to your natural ("courtyard") with your 12th worker unit (probe, in the case of protoss).

Not the parent commenter but not always. 9 pool just means you build a spawning pool at your main, for instance. This worker-prefix building build-order naming system also breaks down once people start referencing builds like 2 rax academy, 3 hatch muta, etc.

Right, "9 pool" means build a spawning pool when you have 9 workers. So "12 courtyard" means build an expansion when you have 12 workers.

I think strictly "9 pool" means you build the pool when you have 9 supply. However, before you build a spawning pool, the only thing you can build that consumes supply is workers.

A lot of Korean slang is a little different. Source: not Korean but have been in the English community a long time and picked some stuff up.

"1rax double" is equivalent to "1rax expand" or "1rax CC". They use multi or double to mean expand in the early game. Instead of "cheese" or "all-in" they use "pil-sal-gi" which means ace/joker card or "han-bang" which means an army or attack on few resources.

I am not sure what short-hand they use for barracks, gateway, etc.

Instead of "cheese" or "all-in" they use "pil-sal-gi" which means ace/joker card

That’s a really interesting one to me! One thing I’ve noticed is that Koreans do not seem to have the same hangups / negative attitude towards cheese strategies as westerners do!

As far as I can tell, there's no hang up about 'cheese' at the higher levels of competition even among westerners. But that might just be from the extreme Korean influence at that level?

The attitude seems to be that throwing in the occasional cheese is not so much meant to win the game, as it is meant to make sure your opponent wastes resources on defending against a potential cheese at all the other times.

This is very similar to the function of a bluff in a theoretical analysis of poker. Very simplified, the optimal frequency of bluffing is when bluffing just about breaks even against optimal play from your opponents. But throwing the bluffing in masks when you actually have good cards.

A failed cheese usually leaves the attacker so weak that the game is already lost. Cheeses are intended to win the game.

But if you are known to never cheese, your opponent might bet on greedy strategies, sometimes known as "economic cheese": you don't prepare any defense, and skip scouting, to build an overwhelming army all of a sudden at some given time like just after an important couple of upgrades that boost the army (a timing attack).

The "normal" play (economic growth plus scouting) is usually the superior strat, but if your scouting fails to detect a cheese attempt that must be countered with a very specific defense, the game is lost. The occasional cheese keep the players honest so they spend resources in scouting, instead of going greedy.

StarCraft has its own bluffing scheme, that is faking a build so the opponent goes for a specific counter, but actually going for something else.

This is a good example of a game-theoretic equilibrium :)

> A failed cheese usually leaves the attacker so weak that the game is already lost. Cheeses are intended to win the game.

> But if you are known to never cheese, your opponent might bet on greedy strategies, sometimes known as "economic cheese": you don't prepare any defense, and skip scouting, to build an overwhelming army all of a sudden at some given time like just after an important couple of upgrades that boost the army (a timing attack).

Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to say.

And the optimal cheese frequency is when cheesing has the same expected win-rate as 'normal' play.

> StarCraft has its own bluffing scheme, that is faking a build so the opponent goes for a specific counter, but actually going for something else.

Yes. I didn't say cheese was bluffing. Just that the strategic considerations around cheese frequency are similar to the math for bluffing in poker.

Westerners do use cheese but many of them are very unhappy about it. Probably its biggest detractor is Dan 'Artosis' Stemkosky, a man who has dedicated his life to StarCraft and who sees cheese strategies as a betrayal of the beauty of the game. He nevertheless grudgingly engages in the occasional cheese, though his opponents nearly always see it coming because he saves it for when he's truly on tilt (another poker term).

I think the real issue is that, like learning to play the piano, StarCraft demands extreme levels of practice to master its physically demanding control scheme. To then lose to an inferior opponent who merely bluffed you feels profoundly unfair. For whatever reason, Koreans seem to be better equipped to handle the cognitive dissonance associated with such an unfair system. Perhaps the Korean school system (and its infamous final exam) has something to do with it?

Is there any link to “ace” meaning a tennis serve that the defending player fails to make any contact with? I could see the parallel with a “cheese” strategy being an unexpectedly fast attack.

I suspect the link is with playing cards and gambling?

Thanks for the added context on the builds! As "foreign" BW player and fellow speech processing researcher, I agree shallow contextual biasing should help. While not difficult to implement, most generally available ASR solutions don't make it easy to use. There's a PR in ctranslate2 implementing the same feature so that it could be exposed in faster-whisper: https://github.com/OpenNMT/CTranslate2/pull/1789

Been a while since I played the game, but in all translations I was confused why you'd want to build 12 spawning pools.

If I remember correctly, that building was for enabling creation of zerglings and other units in hatcheries (and also for researching upgrades) - but one building was enough to unlock those units in all hatcheries; and it did not produce any units itself, so building more of them wouldn't increase your unit output either.

You could in theory built several of them to research multiple upgrades in parallel, but there were only like 3 possible upgrades anyway, so it would make sense to build 12 of them.

The only reason I could think of would be as a sort of redundancy, so you can keep building zerglings even if the enemy destroys some of the pools. But 12 also seems excessive for that.

So what exactly was the motivation here?

Sorry if I'm talking rubbish here, as I said, it's been a while.

The number is not the amount of buildings, but the amount of drones you have when you build the building

OK, that makes more sense. Thanks a lot!

12 Pool means build your spawning pool at 12 supply, usually the number before the building is at which supply you build the building, and it assumes you're constantly producing workers.

Ooh ok. I feel stupid now :)

Thanks for the clarification!

Don’t let the title fool you: this is anextremely thorough and creative take on translating and making more approachable the commentary of StarCraft.

As the author rightly points out, in its 27 years of existence, commentary around the game has become a domain specific language. Not just Korean or English.

This approach of automated scripting and using AI to understand roughly what was said and then make it coherent is really cool.

LOL, as a non-native English speaker, reading this reminds me of EXACTLY the same problem of translating many things, but more precisely, computer articles and software development.

There’s a huge amount of terms that are difficult to translate (sharding? Hash?). The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time. But it requires a community that, to some degree, is able to cross the gap between the languages. In this case, learning English.

Talking about software development in Spanish (my native language) is a succession of imported terms from English.

I don’t think there’s a good way of doing that, and I’m interested to see how automatic translations deal with it, because the only way this can work is with a process of mixing both language in a social way and see what terms evolve from that process.

And you need, in the terms the post describes, people that know Korean at least in a non-fluent way. And the game itself, of course.

With Spanish we have the added complexity that there are different linguistic traditions around the world. For example, in Mexico I learned "depurar", an existing Spanish word that closely fits the meaning of "debug". However, many Spanish speakers simply say "debuguear", just directly borrowing the English word. In Mexico I also learned "desempeño" to describe the performance of a computer or software, but in Argentina I've heard "el performance" to say the same.

I think the most common thing is to just use English loanwords without trying to find existing Spanish words that fit the meaning.

Why would sharding and hash be difficult to translate when they use metaphors that are easy to visualize in a "physical" context ?

I think the words' metaphorical meanings don't help much unless you already know what they mean. If you heard the word "sharding" for the first time and all you knew was that it had something to do with computers, I think you'd have a hard time guessing that it means "partitioning rows of a database across multiple servers to reduce load".

Sure there’s a Spanish word for shard though?

According to Google, shard directly translates to el casco - helmet, shell, hoof, hulk, body, shard

But in English in this context I read it more like shard of glass, which Google translates as fragmento de vidrio

Yes, but this goes for the English word too.

In Polish literature, I saw "reflection" translated literally in programming book and it took me a while to even understand what the translator was trying to do.

Keeping loanwords is just simpler - we're going to learn them from English anyway.

In some sense, these terms are extremely trivial to adapt: the German term for sharding is just a literal borrow, just say 'sharding'.

What's almost impossible to translate are everyday words. German Brot has rather different connotations from the nasty stuff Brits call bread, but I don't think there's a better word available, and a straight-up borrow would feel fairly weird in most context. Much weirder than borrowing 'sharding' in a technical context.

> The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time.

You can see some good examples of that when you look at railway related terms in German. They used to be all English, because that's where we got the technology from. But over time they have been replaced with mostly German native-looking terms. (Well, native looking, but many of them like Lokomotive re-created from the same borrowing from Greek or Latin as in English. But eg station is now Bahnhof. And train is Zug.)

>What's almost impossible to translate are everyday words.

That is very silly: just because German bread is different from British bread doesn't make the word "Brot" almost impossible to translate.

> German Brot has rather different connotations from the nasty stuff Brits call bread, but I don't think there's a better word available, and a straight-up borrow would feel fairly weird in most context. Much weirder than borrowing 'sharding' in a technical context.

I'm absolutely puzzled by this. Not British but I've been to both countries and can't say I noticed much difference in their bread.

What do you consider to be the key distinction between German and British bread? Why do you think it is such a dramatic change that you can't countenance using the same word?

> Not British but I've been to both countries and can't say I noticed much difference in their bread.

I've lived in both places multiple times for years and decades. But even a cursory visit should show you vast differences. The Brits don't even believe in rye.

You can do a simple visual comparison from the comfort of your own home:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+deutsches+brot

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+english+bread

Kinda funny that in an article about translations, the author gets signal-to-noise completely backwards. A high signal to noise (over 9000) is very good. It means you are getting a lot of signal with very little noise. Decreasing signal to noise means getting more noise.

Yes I had to read that a few times to understand it. Much like the google translations.

The author also used domain specific language when they meant jargon.

I noticed this too, although to be fair, “domain specific language” is a remarkably good definition of “jargon”

Domain specific language, to a person outside that domain IS jargon.

I too got thrown off by what they said. Not that the article was really worse off for it, but it took me a moment to parse the meaning.

I was able to understand the Google Translate version well, but I am very familiar with the intricacies of BW and zerg 12hatch openers.

Chatgpt and Claude did an incredible job translating the korean text:

Claude:

  Today I'll teach you about the 12 Hatchery build. I'll explain the types of 12 Hatchery builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and the build orders in a simple but detailed way.
  Against Protoss, this is the build you use when you want to start with the most economic advantage. Against Terran, there are several builds you can do with 12 Hatchery, so I'll explain some of the most commonly used builds.
  The first is the two-hatchery build that starts with 12 Hatchery:
  12 Hatchery
  11 Spawning Pool
  10 Gas
  This build uses early gas, and it's often used when you want to quickly transition into a three-hatchery build with three gas bases.
  The second build is:
  12 Hatchery
  12 Pool
  12 Gas
  This build allows for moderately fast tech tree and moderately fast three-hatchery expansion. This build is commonly known as the "safe three-hatchery" build, and you can think of it as a build that enables both quick Mutalisks and quick third base.

If the author sees this: with yt-dlp you can download lower quality versions of videos to save bandwidth, like so:

  yt-dlp -f "bv[height<=720]" <url>

(where <url> is your URL or video ID)

That will download up to 720p quality.

The author mentions just downloading the audio track. That's a lot less data than downloading any video at all. ;)

-f 140 is the right yt-dlp parameter to get just the audio.

I think it's just "-x". It should select the best audio quality automatically.

Oh, I missed that! In that case,

  yt-dlp -x <url>

.. or optionally to convert it to mp3 on the fly:

  yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 <url>

.. or doing so with also the best audio quality available:

  yt-dlp -f 'ba' -x --audio-format mp3 <url>

Dumb question from someone who only played money-maps as a kid:

What do the numbers in front of the building mean? 12 Hatcheries seems like… well, 12 seems like a possible but implausible number of hatcheries to build (hypothetically it is possible of course). And 12 spawning pools is obviously not useful. So that makes me think it is the position in the build order list. But, they list other builds, like:

> The second is the 12 Hatch, 12 Pool, 12 Gas

Which doesn’t make a ton of sense in with that parsing. I mean it must not be a straight list. Maybe it is a tree, and 12 is the depth for this building? But that seems late, I can’t think of 11 buildings to build before gas. Maybe they include units too? Or maybe just drones/overlords?

Is it how many workers you have when you build that building

It's the supply of when you should build it. In the early game it's essentially how many workers you have.

It denotes how much supply you should have when you start the building. All of your supply at this stage comes from workers, so it's also an indication how many workers you should train.

In the game you build buildings and units. The units take up "supply" which there is a limit on. At the beginning of the game you mostly just building workers (unless you scout your opponent is going for an extremely early attack), who mine resources and construct buildings.

The numbers indicate the supply you should be at when you build the structure.

so a 12 hatch 12 pool 12 gas means you get to 12 workers and then build those 3 buildings in that order as soon as you have the resources for those.

For zerg the workers actually become the building, so I assume you hit 12, build the hatchery, build another worker, build the spawning pool, build another worker, and then build your gas refinery.

Yes as zerg the lost supply is counted, so you can either go 12 hatch 11 pool 10 gas or 12-12-12 if you want to be a little bit more economically greedy at the expense of making it much harder to hold 8rax in ZvT as an example.

As you get later into the game people who play more seriously also use the in-game clock, or timing a building placement relative to how complete a different building is to determine building timing. This helps with subtleties like whether you lost your scouting worker or not (-1 supply), if the early game got really weird because you had to build more units to hold some aggression, etc.

IIRC it started with "4-pooling" which is when, as Zerg, you build a spawning pool while only having 4 workers (it's been years, forget what they're called), rebuild your 4th worker and then start making zerglings to achieve a super-early attack (a "rush").

Then your opponent calls you all sorts of vile names and questions your sexuality, etc.

That's only if you manage to get the first two zerglings out faster than it takes for opponent's SCVs to arrive at your base and kill your drones (that's the name of Zerg workers) :).

Probably. I was a Protoss main and always sucked at playing Zerg. I used to pray they'd go hydralisks so I could drop a reaver into their drones.

Reaver drops were super annoying. Some friends I played regularly with at school liked to do it, forcing me to always keep a Siege Tank some distance from each resource cluster. One friend was particularly fond of Shuttle+Reaver micro (and their even more annoying cousins, Shuttle+Reaver over a cliff, and High Templars cliff drop), forcing me to commit two tanks per base.

As you can guess, I was a Terran main. While my recipe for Protoss friends was plain heavy metal, I took my frustration out on Zerg players. One thing I loved to do was to have two science vessels cast Defensive Matrix and Irradiate on each other, and fly them over enemy drones. People who haven't seen it before got mightily confused by what's going on. Doubly so when they decided to throw a "quick reaction" Mutalisk squad at them, only to watch them all die.

(That was even funnier than calling in a nuclear strike and flying a building over the red blinking dot to hide it. You'd think a random Engineering Bay floating in enemy's main would be a clear giveaway, but people always got so stressed by the "nuclear launch detected" warning that they couldn't connect the dots in time.)

SC:BW was a game like no others.

I miss those days of few responsibilities

> And 12 spawning pools is obviously not useful.

I vaguely remember a Husky video where he actually did a "9 pool" with building 9 spawning pools.

That would be just a flex or a joke or something, right?

Correct. You can also find the same joke about "6 pool" around 1:38 in this classic music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU2mD02HWnk

There might be a video where this happens, but I think it's more likely that you're misremembering it; there was a somewhat famous game cast by Husky where Cella[1] (a professional player) was joking around on the Internet playing 2v2 (2 teams of 2 players each).

He asked his partner what strategy he should use, the person responded with "13 gate" (meaning: keep building probes until you have 13, then build your first warpgate). Cella pretended to misunderstand and instead built 13 warpgates, which is a horrible strategy, but they still won the game. They only won because his partner could barely defend him in early game while he was building the warpgates. After surviving early game, it wasn't a fair fight even with a horrible strategy, because it's a professional against "normal" people on the Internet.

I don't think the video exists anymore, Husky famously removed his whole channel with a lot of StarCraft 2 early history, but I found this Reddit thread[2] talking about the game (WeRRa was Cella's team at the time, that's why they call him CellaWeRRa).

[1] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Cella

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dyjk9/cellawerra...

I like this one (from low level SC2)... I'll not saywhat it is about exactly for spoilers' sake (avoid the comments) :

https://youtu.be/gLVJq2MHHmk

Yeah, I think I merged the 13 gate Cella video with the 6 pool gag from the music video. It's sadly been a long time.

People already explained that's it's how much supply you have.

In practice this is easier for people to use than actual clock timings, because it's more robust to delays or interference. If you remember "third rax at 30 supply" then even if you're playing a little slow, you will still know roughly when to build that. But if you memorized exact clock timings and now you might be 20+ seconds behind, it's hard to know when you should fit in the new building.

It's not perfect of course, and if you get cheesed and the game goes weird then you'll have to start improvising rather than relying on just supply timings, a lot of times after a cheese where neither side definitely wins, the balance between tech and economy is now very non-standard and you can't rely on conventional rules of thumb anymore.

Plus, in-game clocks didn't exist until Remastered came out

Doesn't it mean you build your expansion once you have 12 worker units?

Even when Google Translate got pretty good I was not really able to effectively translate Chinese or Japanese text about Go (the game). I had similar issues to the ones mentioned in this post. Many Chinese and Japanese words (e.g., "ko") have a very specific meaning in the context of Go, but they also have regular meanings (e.g., "robbery") in more normal contexts, so Google Translate would translate text in a generic way, which made everything unintelligible. With modern LLMs, I can now preface my translation requests with instructions such as "I am going to ask you to translate some Chinese text accompanying weiqi diagrams. Your translations should be idiomatic and not shy away from Go jargon. For example, 拆 = extension, 夹 = pincer, 刺 and 觑 = peep.", and it does a fantastic job, enough for me to basically read anything I want. It was lucky for me that evidently enough Go material already existed in the training set that I didn't have to do anything more special.

(Some chess corrections, in case the author is reading: the moves at the start of chess games are called openings in English, not openers; there are not distinct white-piece and black-piece openings, although of course an individual player will probably study a given opening from the point of view of one side or the other; their study is considered fundamental all the way up to the highest level, in fact more so as you increase in skill; and the Sicilian variation in question is the Najdorf, not Najdork.)

Najdork is now headcanon.

I loved this article, thanks for writing it.

I attempted playing a few world cyber game US regional matches and I was always amazed how much faster everyone else was. Then I remember when they live streamed it from Korea and I saw how fast they played and I was blown away. From a strategy point of view, something so basic about the game that I missed was when a blog introduced me to some math for a protoss zealot power up that defeated a zergling in 2 hits rather than 3. That's when I realized this is a chess game and I got hooked.

I get that it's "wrong" but I really like the translation of "natural expansion" to "courtyard"

I like "front yard", it makes sense for SC2 where some recent maps do have a back base (usually with fewer minerals and/or gas).

These "backyard bases" are also often encountered on team maps; deciding which player takes the front is strategic. P&T can build batteries and bunkers together, but Z gets a buff on creep and can spread it forward much faster.

I really wish someone with the resources and connections could get in touch with South Korean broadcasters in order to get access to their archives so that more historical games could get uploaded and re-commentated for a western audience.

My favorite Brood War slang term is Ee Han Timing [0]: basically when you take a risky build that has to do damage in a small timing window. A ton of exciting Brood War moments come from exploiting tiny timing windows.

[0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Ee_Han_Timing

Artosis was doing this with historical games and then he started getting DMCAed from the copyright holders of the original broadcasts.

Yeah, I heard about that. Someone with enough resources and connections could probably license the rights, but I doubt it would ever be profitable. Still, I really hope that this key part of gaming history doesn't end up lost.

That's much of the game in a nutshell, in varying degrees. If one player makes many units and the other is instead collecting resources, the first player has to do damage to equalize or else the other player got away with it and the first is way behind. At the top levels, smaller actions like making one or two early attack units applies the same to a smaller degree, but early game differences compound thus matter more than the same later on.

I was a reasonably competitive BW player until the Korean teams arrived on the scene. I'll always appreciate how they elevated the level of gameplay. Really nice guys, too, I learned a lot from playing with them, and it was fun talking strategy via chat to the best of our mutual linguistic abilities. Good memories. I would have absolutely loved something like this project back in the day.

for any of the lucky 10000, like me, who were left wanting to see what this game looked like:

https://youtu.be/Nm-PXmOELAw?si=Z-RXbdqNzkSF3cqx

my brief search didn't show me any more obscure Korean only strategy videos, so maybe this one is just for the lowly foreigners :(

Artosis (the person who is the English speaking commentator in the video) is in general quite technical - especially when it comes to the Terran fraction (one of the three fractions in the game; the other is Protoss - that you see in the video, and third is Zerg).

However Korea had a much bigger scene, with lots of players, coaches, teams - so they probably have more institutional knowledge. So the suspicion, or assumption is that Artois can be the high-school coach level, but there are university coaches and professional coaches, who perhaps are even better. And they are better since in Korea Brood War had much bigger monetary backing - and social backing too. If everyone in your highschool played the same game, there would be more players. Then if there were around 12 (or more) professional teams, they would find more talent, but also better coaches.

And it's not that Koreans dominated completely, players from other countries could win against them too, but usually they would not, especially as a whole match consisted often of few games (usually: best of 3 (so you need to win two games to proceed), best of 5 for finals).

To rephrase this differently, the two main English speaking comentators nowadays seem to be Artosis, who is technical and the second is "Falcon Paladin" channel, who is entertaining and commentary is often "what he sees on the screen" (with no, or sometimes even bad takes about strategy - or explanations "why we see what we see").

If Korea has 50 such commentators, then probably some will be entertaining and some will be very technical.

On a side note, Starcraft Brood War is not only very well balanced for play and entertaining to play - it is also very entertaining to watch, since units are relatively distinct and it at least partially avoids the "unit blob" problem (where one group of units attacks another group of units) due to existence of various units that make area damage (for example.. tanks). And yes I know that in big battles there are blobs, but at pro level they generally work really hard to spread the units across the battlefield - even if the units are primitive and have bad pathing. I digress, just wanted to say that the game is simply pleasant to watch - because it has a certain clarity.

I've been watching BW out of Korea since 2007. Previously also played but it's been many years. This is really cool, thanks for sharing!

There are two YouTube channels I wanted to take the opportunity to shout out, the first one does English translations of Korean BW content, and the second one provides commentary on recent tournaments like the ASL with a little bit more depth then Tasteless and Artosis (no hate but to me their commentary is too off topic and they miss basic things about build orders).

https://www.youtube.com/@jinjinBW

https://m.youtube.com/@StarCastTVENG

Warms my heart to see effort put into a beloved game. Just this week I watched a YT video of a sc custom game where the players were discussing whether its worth the effort to translate in-game korean-language content. Its an old game that is played by a niche community in north america. The majority of custom games are created in korean and never get to translated for the small number of north american players that would be interested.

How far off are we from local immidiate voice translation? Something on my computer that translates all spoken words by my computer, keeping tone and intonation?

Reminds me, many years ago someone paid me to translate a Korean wiki article about some League of Legends pro player to English. No idea why, most of it was random trivia, it didn't contain any notable insights. But it was decent money as a side job so I didn't bother asking. Possibly similar motives to this article?

> Very few of members of the foreigner community are fluent in Korean. Foreigner access to Korean BW discourse is a contradicting concept: if you speak Korean fluently, you have no reason to be in the foreigner community, as it only has access to material that is strictly inferior and more limited. For this reason, Korean-speaking members in the foreigner community are exceedingly rare.

I can vouch for this in general - after becoming fluent I've stopped looking up anything related to Korea in English because the quality of information is much worse. I'm sure the same holds for other languages and places.

This is amazing. I'm getting chills!

As a side note, I have gotten into watching a "foreigner" BW channel everyday called ArtosisCasts. The videos are very strategic and high level commentaries on games as they are watched for the first time, with some after-match highlights for especially interesting maneuvers. It has really made me appreciate the depth of the game, as well as explain how I was so bad at it in high school. It has actually made me think a lot about startups, economic optimization, and how you approach the "meta" of any activity you're undertaking.

FWIW, I asked Claude to translate and compare its translation to this as well as Google Translate. I then pasted top threads from this page, and asked it to retranslate the original.

First:

  Hello, today I'll be teaching you about the 12 Inner Base build. I'll explain the types of 12 Inner Base builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and give you a detailed but simple breakdown of the build order.
  
  Against Protoss, this is a build you use when you want to start with a more economical opening. Against Terran, there are several builds you can do with a 12 Inner Base. I'll explain some of the most commonly used builds.
  
  The first is the Two Hatchery build that starts with 12 Inner Base. The order is:
  - 12 Inner Base
  - 11 Spawning Pool
  - 10 Gas
  This build utilizes early gas. It's commonly used when you want to quickly transition into Three Hatchery play with three gas bases.
  
  The second build is:
  - 12 Inner Base
  - 12 Pool
  - 12 Gas
  This gives you moderately fast tech tree progression and moderately fast Three Hatchery expansion. This build is commonly referred to as the 'Safe Three Hatch.' You can think of it as a build that gives you both fast Mutalisks and fast three base play.

>>> Then, post HN comments:

  Hello, today I'll teach you about the 12 Natural build [note: actually 앞마당/frontyard in Korean StarCraft terminology, seemingly transcribed as 안마당]. I'll explain the types of 12 Natural builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and give you a simple but detailed breakdown of the build order.
  
  Against Protoss [토스/Toss in Korean], this is a build you use when you want the most economic opening. Against Terran, there are several builds possible with a 12 Natural. I'll explain some of the most commonly used ones.
  
  The first is the Two-Hatchery build [투에처리, should be 투해처리] that starts with 12 Natural. The order is:
  - 12 supply: Natural expansion
  - 11 supply: Spawning Pool 
  - 10 supply: Gas
  This build utilizes early gas. It's commonly used when you want to quickly transition into a Three-Hatchery build with three gas bases.
  
  The second build timing is:
  - 12 supply: Natural
  - 12 supply: Pool
  - 12 supply: Gas
  This gives you a moderately fast tech tree and moderately fast Three-Hatchery expansion. This build is commonly known as the 'Safe Three-Hatch' [안 3에처리 in Korean], and you can think of it as a build that enables both fast Mutalisks and fast third base.

This is great work, but really it seems that anyone who is a truly dedicated Brood War amateur should knuckle under and learn Korean. It really isn’t that unapproachable: with a decent approach (try https://refold.la ) you should be able to get somewhere useful in maybe “just” 3000 hours.

Nit-picking, but a high signal to noise ratio is desirable, indicating low levels of noise compared to signal, not the reverse.

I wonder how well AI audio generation would work here, to produce a voiceover video like the original input.

I've always wanted translations of Korean game broadcasts (GSL/ASL). I'm curious what balance their commentators strike between game analysis and entertainment, and whether there's a disparity between Korean and Foreigner game analysis. Do they have a Tastosis?

Impressive project, and I always love reading about the communities that form around competitive games.

It feels kind of sad to admit as a chess player, but "Najdork variation" is one of the funniest typos I've seen.

> "Starting off the most affluently" is an awkward and verbose way to say "this is an economic opener/build."

Why would it be awkward and verbose?

> Najdork variation

I think OP doesn't like the Najdorf Sicilian... or is this some meme opening I don't know about?

Pretty cool and shows a clear issue I’ve seen across any LLM. the language and grammar is so formal/robotic

This depends a lot on how the model was fine-tuned. There are many LLaMA tunes that are not at all formal, for example.

With ChatGPT specifically, some forceful prompting can make it sound much better.

Neat. I wonder what Google Translate uses these days and if its gotten or will receive an update to a new LLM.

I’ve been wondering that, too, for the past two years, ever since it became clear that the then-new GPT-4 could translate better than Google Translate could. A lot of people still use Google Translate because that’s what comes up in Google requests for translations; also, it seems to be the translation engine built into Google Docs. However, properly prompted LLMs are definitely better than the previous generation of dedicated machine translation, which I’m afraid is what Google Translate still seems to be.

As the author points out, this does seem like exactly the kind of language problem that LLM‘s ought to excel at, and I love that moment of discovery when the testers were so busy discussing the content that they forgot to focus on the accuracy of the translation!

ok but where are the vods?

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