[object Object]May 27

I’m glad people are finally noticing LLM translators will just make plausible sentences the fuck up when they’re fed anything but a perfect source to translate, which makes them exhausting and damaging for language learning and a variety of other situations where you’re expected to actually, you know, use the fucking language for anything but a highly inaccurate skim

thank fuck all the language learning companies didn’t jump onto the LLM train, right?

…right?

Show threadsotolfMay 27
@zzt I have complained about machine translation for about a decade by now, usually what I meet is "What am I supposed to do? Learn the language?" yeah, just like I learned english to be able to communicate with people who don't bother.
Show thread[object Object]May 27
@sotolf right! and for my purposes (learning the damn language with my human brain) the LLM translations are worse for me, because it’s very obvious when an old school translator fucks up and I can sometimes figure out how it got there and retranslate by hand, but the LLM will just extrude its fuckups into unrelated text
Show threadsotolfMay 27
@zzt Yeah, I can think that's annoying yeah, I speak 3 languages daily, and some times I just need a nudge for a word, so I pop a sentence into one of the online translators, and even then when i use rather clear example sentences at times the result is really weird.
Show thread[object Object]May 27

@sotolf I miss my last LWT app, which defaulted to using classical bilingual dictionaries for definitions. that isn’t perfect, but it fails in predictable ways and gives me the possibility to look up the original source for more context from the original linguists if available.

my current app just turned a couple of bilingual dictionaries and an LLM into a slurry of definitions and doesn’t tell you its source for anything. the top result always gets a ✨ regardless of its origin of course

Show threadsotolf

@zzt Yeah, I'm old enough that most of my language learning was with paper dictionaries and tons of hand writing :p Text books and a classrom setting still is the best I think, but it's not something that is really that likely to be achieveable if you just want to learn a language as a hobby.

My learning german was going way faster working in it every day, and not having any way out of it if I want to eat :p but that also is not something that I would suggest anyone do :p

May 27 at 2:26pmWeb