Eugen RochkoMachine 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 useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.
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 within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
Tubemeister@Gargron Yes. My wife for years shunned Pratchett completely because she read a Dutch translation in the 90s.
Damien (TIG BUSINESS)@Tubemeister @Gargron puns are extra hard.
@aeduna @Gargron Oh yes. Translating the story is one thing, but especially with Pratchett it’s only half the story.
Puns are horrible to translate, you either just skip them because they just don’t work, or you go to extremes to wring some kind of joke out of them.
There isn’t necessarily a right approach here. This particular Pratchett translation apparently skipped a lot, but I also remember a HHGTTG translation that took the “a joke at *any* cost” path and um.
@Tubemeister @Gargron Asterisk provides an alternative where you replace it with another pun, but that's beyond translation :)
I don't have a reference, but I remember reading that later translations to dutch specifically were much better - it wasn't a quick and dirty word for word, someone was employed to put some real work into trying to keep the sense of the joke there.