Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

AI translations are getting good. I've been working on our company website in the last month. It's a static website. So, I use Agentic coding tools to implement both content and technical changes. A simple prompt "align the translations with the English version for all pages" and some guard rails in the form of skills and AGENTS.md instructions are doing most of the heavy lifting. To be clear.

These translations are not perfect, yet. But good enough for my needs. Any professional translator services would in any case be beyond our budget. The advantage of using agentic coding tools here (enabled by using a site generator rather than a CMS) is that I can get systematic about dealing with jargon, SEO, and frequently used phrases. I simply document all that and instruct the tool to refer to that. The funny thing is that most of the models are pretty good at fixing their own mistakes if you just ask them too. I asked it to look for examples of "denglish" (German English) in its own German translations and then to fix it. It found a few examples and the suggested fixes were fine.

A lot of people are focusing on the negative here. I like to look at the positive. We're approaching the moment where any person on this planet will be able to communicate directly with any other person on this planet without the need for translators. The tools already exist for this. But they need a lot of work on quality.

A second point here is that the role of English as the most popular intermediary language is disappearing as well. I'm not a native speaker. When I talk to foreigners from wherever, it's mostly in (bad) English. By definition that limits me to talking to people that have had enough education and exposure to English. This is very limiting. A lot of the people we need to talk to here in Germany aren't all that comfortable speaking English.

> A lot of people are focusing on the negative here.

The negative: people are about to lose their jobs.

The positive: AI billionaires become trillionaires.

Why focus on the negative indeed!

I think a real life tower of Babel is pretty cool. God destroyed it because he was afraid of a unified humanity.

> God destroyed it

Where does it say that? I have never read any Book of Genesis that says "God destroyed the tower".

Also it doesn't say "God was afraid". God doesn't have negative emotions like that. God plans out everything, so He is not "afraid" in the human sense.

In fact, I am fairly certain that the mythical "Tower" for the Jews was sort of a parody of the Pyramids of Egypt and the Ziggurats of Mesopotamia. They were essentially mocking their ancient neighbors in the Levant for such a frivolous project that they believed really didn't honor God, but increased their arrogance and hubris.

In fact, the Sumerians worshipped a god named "Sin" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_(mythology) and it is believed that the "plain of Shinar" and the "wilderness of Sin" are cognate with this term, and therefore represents the ancient deity that was worshipped in that particular case.

For Egypt, the pyramids were funerary monuments, i.e. they invariably honored some dead Pharaoh. The Jews invested their engineering progress in building a temple of the Living God instead.

So it stands to reason, in the Hebrews' account of the foreign projects, that immigrants would come in, mess up the project enough, and they would kinda abandon them in progress. But they weren't destroyed.

But almost everyone speaks English as a second language, and most native English speakers don’t care enough to communicate with everyone.

Por que? Who is ‘everyone’ here?

I mean people outside their immediate surroundings. People rarely seek out connection across cultures. We prefer like minded people.

Douglas Adams's prediction seems more apposite:

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

And where would you put "billions of people now have access to better translations on demand"?

People talk about business as though only the owners of the business benefit. Everybody else pays the price. But aren't the main beneficiaries all the people using these services?

The translations aren't better though. Translations across a whole suite of services have got noticeably worse since the advent of AI.

This is explicitly not a benefit to the people using the services.

Are you saying that somebody took translations that had already been written and replaced them with AI generated worse translations? That has got to be a rare exception, no?

But more to your point: you might not have run into languages that didn't have proper translations available, but billions of other people did. In the past I read a machine translated book before. It was almost like a derivative work because it would randomly differ by a huge amount from the source material.

> billions of people now have access to better translations on deman

As a German speaker, I experience the quality of German language technical documentation steadily declining. 30 years ago, German documentation was usually top notch. With the first machine translations, quality went notably down. Now, with LLM translation, it's often garbage with phrases of obvious nonsense in it.

This is especially true with large companies like IBM, Microsoft or Oracle.

I guess the situation is better for languages where translations only became available with LLM.

Well ideally they don't, and when the bubble eventually pops and they go bankrupt we're left with a wide set of useful local models and cheap surplus hardware to run them ourselves. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

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