points
2 months ago
| 2 comments
| HN
And where would you put "billions of people now have access to better translations on demand"?

People talk about business as though only the owners of the business benefit. Everybody else pays the price. But aren't the main beneficiaries all the people using these services?

cedilla
2 months ago
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> billions of people now have access to better translations on deman

As a German speaker, I experience the quality of German language technical documentation steadily declining. 30 years ago, German documentation was usually top notch. With the first machine translations, quality went notably down. Now, with LLM translation, it's often garbage with phrases of obvious nonsense in it.

This is especially true with large companies like IBM, Microsoft or Oracle.

I guess the situation is better for languages where translations only became available with LLM.

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Peritract
2 months ago
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The translations aren't better though. Translations across a whole suite of services have got noticeably worse since the advent of AI.

This is explicitly not a benefit to the people using the services.

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Aerroon
2 months ago
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Are you saying that somebody took translations that had already been written and replaced them with AI generated worse translations? That has got to be a rare exception, no?

But more to your point: you might not have run into languages that didn't have proper translations available, but billions of other people did. In the past I read a machine translated book before. It was almost like a derivative work because it would randomly differ by a huge amount from the source material.

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