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@Gargron@mastodon.social
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@Gargron@mastodon.social
Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are
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@Gargron@mastodon.social
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@Gargron@mastodon.social
I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar
Scottish resident SF/F author (he/him/they/them). Three times Hugo Award winner, 30+ novels in print. Does not play well with Nazis. Abolish the monarchy! Born in a world with 320ppm atmospheric CO2, 3.3 billion people. @cstross.bsky.social on Bluesky blog at: https://www. antipope.org/charlie/blog-stat ic/ FOLLOW REQUESTS: don't expect a reciprocal follow. And I will reject requests from folks with no profile and/or no tooting history.
wandering.shop
Scottish resident SF/F author (he/him/they/them). Three times Hugo Award winner, 30+ novels in print. Does not play well with Nazis. Abolish the monarchy! Born in a world with 320ppm atmospheric CO2, 3.3 billion people. @cstross.bsky.social on Bluesky blog at: https://www. antipope.org/charlie/blog-stat ic/ FOLLOW REQUESTS: don't expect a reciprocal follow. And I will reject requests from folks with no profile and/or no tooting history.
wandering.shop
@cstross@wandering.shop
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Mar 10, 2026
@Gargron@mastodon.social I'm willing to guess that machine translation of prose may serve two uses: firstly, as an assist for human translators (by preparing a very rough first cut, which they then have to refine), and secondly, as an assist for human editors in figuring out which foreign-language-works to pay a human translator (with or without AI assistance) to work on (translation costs money: knowing where to spend it is important). But those are assistive roles, not human-replacing ones.
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