from Hacker News

Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

by grep_it on 1/9/24, 9:34 PM with 57 comments

• by simonebrunozzi on 1/10/24, 2:52 AM

  I agree with Antirez on the fear: I call this the "Google Maps effect", the more you use Google Maps, the less you learn about city streets, etc.

  By the way, I am Italian too; I lived in the US (SF) for ~10 years, and I speak (I think) a pretty good English.

  More than 20 years ago I wrote a novel, Nonovvio, in Italian. A couple of months ago I decided to translate it to English, using GPT-4.

  Here you can find both the (original) Italian version, and the one created with GPT-4. [0].

  I don't think the novel is amazing nor a work of art; however, what I find interesting is how prescient I was on a number of things that happened after I finished writing it in the early 2000s.

  [0]: https://github.com/simonebrunozzi/Nonovvio

• by kromem on 1/10/24, 12:27 AM

  > It shocks me that I can hear my voice when reading the translation.

  For me, this phenomenon with Copilot and a decade old codebase where I was the only contributor was unlike anything I'd experienced.

  It's one thing to see other people's thoughts reshaped by AI, but when it's your own thinking it's a very eerie feeling.

  Maybe only happens 10-15% of the time, but when it does it's uncanny.

• by tkgally on 1/10/24, 1:21 AM

  LLMs offer a big advantage over other types of machine translation: they can translate the source text in multiple ways. You can then pick and choose from among those versions to produce the final wording that you like best.

  Here are five translations of the same passage from a speech by the Japanese prime minister. They were all prepared by GPT-4 from a single prompt:

  1. Since becoming Prime Minister, I have visited many ASEAN countries. I recently returned from visits to Malaysia and the Philippines. In every country, I have felt the depth of business ties with Japan and the strength of personal connections beyond business.

  2. As Prime Minister, I have had the opportunity to visit numerous ASEAN countries. Just recently, I traveled to Malaysia and the Philippines. Everywhere I went, I witnessed the profound business connections with Japan, as well as the enduring personal relationships that transcend business.

  3. Since my appointment as Prime Minister, I've visited several ASEAN countries. My recent trips included Malaysia and the Philippines. In each country, the depth of business connections with Japan and the enduring strength of interpersonal relationships beyond business were evident.

  4. In my role as Prime Minister, I've visited many ASEAN countries. Recently, I was in Malaysia and the Philippines. In each nation, I felt the depth of Japan's business ties and the robustness of personal connections that go beyond mere business.

  5. As Prime Minister, I've had the honor of visiting several ASEAN countries. My recent travels took me to Malaysia and the Philippines. In every country, the strength of Japan's business ties and the resilience of personal relationships beyond business were apparent.

  The prompt I used and the full source text and translations are here:

  https://gally.net/temp/20240110multipletranslations.html

• by speps on 1/10/24, 1:03 AM

  > I hope that the fact I can write well enough in my mother language in some way it is still visibile in my English posts

  I don't know if it's GPT-4 or an actual editing typo but using "visibile" instead of "visible" in that sentence is actually quite ironically funny.

  On the post itself, I totally understand the point being bilingual myself with English being my second language. However, now having been living 11 years in the UK, I'm more comfortable with writing in English.

• by neom on 1/10/24, 12:47 AM

  It's insane to me much how much better GPT-4 is than Papago at Korean, and Papago was the gold standard for Korean translation for quite some time. It also performs much better than DeepL in Korean.

• by e12e on 1/9/24, 11:59 PM

  The other post referred to, but not linked, as best I can make out on mobile:

  http://antirez.com/news/140

• by dweekly on 1/10/24, 1:11 AM

  I was recently in Fiji - of note, Google Translate does not support Fijian; however GPT-4 did a lovely job of it.

  GenAI is going to be transformative for low-resource languages - both making their content available to a global audience (outbound) as well as helping those that only know a rare language have access to content in all.

• by tmm84 on 1/11/24, 2:01 AM

  I have recently tried out using GPT4 and other LLMs to help with writing documentation in another language (I speak, read and write it good enough for daily tasks but technical writing is a challenge). I tried it mostly out of the pure fact that many people who knew me at the workplace enjoyed my documentation and code comments because they kinda reflected a comedic / frank nature of what was going on in the code/program. However, it always struck a nerve that my writing while not native or technical brought enjoyment but the need to provide quality technical documents was something I always felt. So, instead of having a co-worker take time to explain what parts of my sentence were non-technical or could be clearer an LLM is more than happy to tell me so I can write better. I feel that when it comes to linguistics LLMs can help those who need to communicate at higher levels get better with less proof-reading required before publishing. It isn't the machine translation of yesterday and it won't replace human interaction but it certainly in my case helps to make my sentences more nuanced to the native audience.

• by pixelbath on 1/10/24, 3:57 AM

  It seems to me that one of the strengths of LLMs is their ability to _not_ differentiate between (human) languages, because to a statistical model, (for lack of a better term) people gonna people, no matter their culture or background.

• by leumon on 1/10/24, 4:17 AM

  I still think (from limited testing with german->french and vice-versa) that DeepL gives better results than gpt4.

• by pferrel on 1/10/24, 12:46 AM

  I did a very quick trial of this with a post I did in English. I don't speak Spanish so am not the best judge for sure but when I translated it to Spanish then back to English it was nearly flawless. Much better, in this same manner, than Google Translate.

• by naet on 1/10/24, 1:18 AM

  There are a lot of grammar errors and other awkward phrases in this translated blog post. Still pretty readable but worth noting it isn't a perfect translation (especially in the context of Duolingo or other learning services leveraging AI).

• by fouc on 1/10/24, 6:53 AM

  The unusual part of the writing of this blog post is how long the sentences are and how many commas there are. I guess Italian prefers longer sentences than english?

• by golergka on 1/10/24, 12:47 AM

  > And fear about the potential AI has to make everybody lazy, no longer willing to do things as hard as learning a new language.

  GPT-4 is also an invaluable help in learning a new language. You can use it as a tutor, explore topics you don't understand well enough, ask it to write texts tailored exactly for your level and vocabulary.

• by nadermx on 1/9/24, 11:49 PM

  The author quips at the fact no one will learn a new language. I'm just waiting for my babble fish