Hacker News Reader

Comment by schrodinger | Hacker News Reader

I have sympathy for those affected but this article is disingenuous. I speak Spanish and have just gone to 3 or 4 Spanish news sites, and passed their articles through to ChatGPT to translate "faithfully and literally, maintaining everything including the original tone."

First it gave a "verbatim, literal English translation" and then asked me if I would like "a version that reads naturally in English (but still faithful to the tone and details), or do you want to keep this purely literal one?"

Honestly, the English translation was perfect. I know Spanish, I knew the topic of the article and had read about it in the NYTimes and other English sources, and I am a native English speaker. It's sad, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. LLMs can translate well, and the article saying otherwise is just not being intellectually honest.

View on HN

What isn't tested here, and what I can't test myself as a mono-linguist, is how well english is translated to other languages. I'm sure it's passable, but I absolutely expect it to be less sufficient because most of the people working on this live in the USA / speak english and work the most on that.

I want to know how it holds up translating Spanish to Farsi, for example.

I see a high risk of idioms getting butchered. It's usually a good idea to translate into English and fix that up first. And unless a native-language editor revises it, there might be sentence structures that feel unnatural in the target language.

A classic issue is dealing with things like wordplay. Good bilingual editors might be able to get across the intended meaning in other ways, but I highly doubt translation software is capable of even recognizing it.

Spanish is probably the most likely language to be succesful (due to the amount of spanish speakers in the US). Still English to Spanish, while passable, is very clearly not something that passes for native speech.

Funnily enough, I'd say it reads like most of my American friends here in Spain - the best way I can put it is, it's fluid spanish from a brain that is working natively in English and translating on the fly, rather than a mind thinking in Spanish.

This is obvious to me because I speak both languages, so I can trace back in my mind the original, native English phrase that resulted in a specific weird spanish expression. a Spanish monolingual can probably only tell that it doesn't sound native.

The important point though, is that there is no significant loss of meaning other than the text being annoying to read. it won't work for literature but it's perfectly serviceable for pragmatic needs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com