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.
Dr. Juande Santander-Vela@Gargron to make matters worse, at least in the UK when you buy a DVD it only comes with English audio, English audio with descriptions, and maybe original audio, and just English subtitles, and English for the hard of hearing. That’s it. But in Spain, the same DVD, locked to the same region, carried the original audio, audio described English audio, Spanish dubbing, German dubbing, Italian dubbing… and all those languages in subtitles, plus some more.
So it is really difficult for them to be exposed to non-English content,
@Gargron and even Netflix shows different audio options in Spain (around five languages audio, plus original English audio for an American or British TV series, and at least the same subtitles) or the UK (just English audio, maybe with audio descriptions).
You need to explicitly go to your user settings *on the website* to explicitly add languages you might be interested in. Then those audio and subtitle options appear for those titles that support them.
Pax Ahimsa GethenI'm in the US and was not aware of this option on Netflix, but just used it to add French and Spanish to my languages, even though I was already able to watch films with these audio and subtitle settings.
In contrast, on Amazon Prime I'm only able to see English subtitle options for non-English films. I was hoping to watch Amelie in French with French subtitles on for learning purposes, but only English subtitles are offered.