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.
Hannah SteenbockI'm seeing more and more "translations" that are just run through machines (DeepL etc.). Even reading the descriptions for those books (some of which are favorite comfort books) in "German" makes me shudder.
It's not German. It's basically English dressed up as German.
Those "translations" are a rip-off for everyone involved except the agencies doing the "translations".
I've refused to read translations for years, but they are now becoming completely unreadable.
tudor@Firlefanz @Gargron Now, german and english has a lot of common in it. Translation is kind of easy.
Hungarian, my beloved language is different in some profound ways.
Deepl interestingly can translate it pretty well to english, but not on a whole book level. When I tried Rejtő books some jokes were recognizable!