> ... a translators’ and interpreters’ work is mostly about ensuring context, navigating ambiguity, and handling cultural sensitivity. This is what Google Translate cannot currently do.
Google Translate can't, but LLMs given enough context can. I've been testing and experimenting with LLMs extensively for translation between Japanese and English for more than two years, and, when properly prompted, they are really good. I say this as someone who worked for twenty years as a freelance translator of Japanese and who still does translation part-time.
Just yesterday, as it happens, I spent the day with Claude Code vibe-coding a multi-LLM system for translating between Japanese and English. You give it a text to be translated, and it asks you questions that it generates on the fly about the purpose of the translation and how you want it translated--literal or free, adapted to the target-language culture or not, with or without footnotes, etc. It then writes a prompt based on your answers, sends the text to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, creates a combined draft from the three translations, and then sends that draft back to the three models for several rounds of revision, checking, and polishing. I had time to run only a few tests on real texts before going to bed, but the results were really good--better than any model alone when I've tested them, much better than Google Translate, and as good as top-level professional human translation.
The situation is different with interpreting, especially in person. If that were how I made my living, I wouldn't be too worried yet. But for straight translation work where the translator's personality and individual identity aren't emphasized, it's becoming increasingly hard for humans to compete.
Alex-Programs 25 minutes ago [-]
I've ended up doing a lot of research into LLM translation, because my language learning tool (https://nuenki.app) uses it a lot.
I built something kinda similar, and made it open source. It picks the top x models based on my research, translates with them, then has a final judge model critique, compare, and synthesise a combined best translation. You can try it at https://nuenki.app/translator if you're interested, and my data is at https://nuenki.app/blog
felipeerias 9 hours ago [-]
It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to provide additional context, ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text.
I live in Japan. Almost every day I find myself asking things like “what does X mean in this specific setting?” or “how do I tell Y to that specific person via this specific medium?”.
Much of this can be further automated via custom instructions, so that e.g. the LMM knows that text in a particular language should be automatically translated and explained.
tkgally 8 hours ago [-]
> It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to ... ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text.
Great ideas. I'll think about adding those features to the system in my next vibe-coding session.
What I automated in the MVP I vibe-coded yesterday could all be done alone by a human user with access to the LLMs, of course. The point of such an app would be to guide people who are not familiar with the issues and intricacies of translation so that they can get better translations for their purposes.
I have no intention to try to commercialize my app, as there would be no moat. Anyone who wanted to could feed this thread to Claude, ask it to write a starting prompt for Claude Code, and produce a similar system in probably less time than it took me.
aidenn0 5 hours ago [-]
I'm bad with names, so for any Japanese literature, I need to take notes; it's not unusual to see one character referred to by 3 names. Then you might have 3 characters that are all referred to as Tanaka-san at different points in time.
jiehong 2 hours ago [-]
The problem with LLMs for translation is when they refuse to do so if the topic being translated isn’t following their policies, even if the context shows it’s fine here.
It can be as simple as discuss one’s own religion
Alex-Programs 23 minutes ago [-]
I made a tool which translates sentences as you browse, for immersion[0]. I solved this by giving the model a code (specifically, "483") to return in any refusal. Then, if I detect that in the output, I fail over to another model+provider.
I also have a few heuristics (e.g. "I can't translate" in many different languages) to detect if it deviates from that.
You just created the software for a profitable business. People would use that and pay for it.
bugtodiffer 2 hours ago [-]
but it is easy to build a competitor
philsnow 12 hours ago [-]
The distinction between what people typically imagine a translator's job is and the reality reminds me of pixar movies being "localized" instead of just translated (green beans on a plate in the Japan release instead of broccoli because that's the food that Japanese kids don't like).
Lacking cultural context while reading translated texts is what made studying history finally interesting to me.
Second, the Pixar one is not "mere" translation; it is full localization because they changed the visual to match the "textual" change.
The Pokemon one is where the change was limited to the "text". The translator's heart might have been in the right place (it would depend on how integral to the story it is that the item is onigiri) but didn't have the authority to make the full breadth of changes needed for such adaptation to be successful.
sodality2 12 hours ago [-]
This article is spot on about a lot of things. One thing I think it fails to address is this:
> I feel confident in asserting that people who say this would not have hired a translator or learned Japanese in a world without Google Translate; they’d have either not gone to Japan at all, or gone anyway and been clueless foreigners as tourists are wont to do.
The correlation here would be something like: the people using AI to build apps previously would simply never have created an app, so it’s not affecting software development as a career as much as you first expect.
It would be like saying AI art won’t affect artists, because the people who would put in such little effort probably would never have commissioned anyone. Which may be a little true (at least in that it reduces the impact).
However, I don’t necessarily know if that’s true for software development. The ability to build software enabled huge business opportunities at very low costs. I think the key difference is this: the people who are now putting in such low effort into commissioning software maybe did hire software engineers before this, and that might throw off a lot of the numbers.
MarkusQ 12 hours ago [-]
Conversely, it may create jobs. Why? Because the more elephants you have in your parade, the more jobs there are for folks to walk behind them with a broom and bucket. For decades we've seen tools that "let users write their own software" and every one of them has driven up the demand for people to clean it up, make it scale, make it secure, or otherwise clean up the mess.
scuff3d 4 hours ago [-]
CAD, Matlab, and Altium made electrical and mechanical engineers more valuable, not less.
The work got easier, so what we do got more complex.
seventytwo 16 minutes ago [-]
They’re all just tools. Use the tools or become obsolete.
camillomiller 2 hours ago [-]
This has been a stable source of business for a while in my niche.
sodality2 11 hours ago [-]
Also true! But that world is one where the vast majority of time is spent cleaning up slop code, so if there's a general shift towards that, I think that still changes the job in a significant way. (I don't have extensive history in the industry yet so I may be wrong here)
MarkusQ 9 hours ago [-]
<tired old fart voice>
It's all cleaning up slop code. Always has been.
</tired old fart voice>
More optimistically, you can think of "user created code" as an attempt at a design document of sorts; they were trying to tell you (and the computer) what they wanted in "your language". And that dialog is the important thing.
ryandrake 9 hours ago [-]
Seriously. Unless you're one of the vanishingly rare few working with true Greenfield projects that start with an empty text file, you're basically cleaning up other developer's legacy slop.
ema 54 minutes ago [-]
I mean even when I'm working on my own projects I'm cleaning up whatever code I wrote when I didn't yet know as much about the shape of the problem.
danielscrubs 27 minutes ago [-]
We still don’t know what good code is. It is all contextual, and we can never decide what that context should be. We are influenced by what is hip today. Right now is static typing using Rust, tomorrow it might be energy usage with assembly, after that it might be Python for productiveness, after that C# for maintenance.
We can never decide, we just like learning, and there is little real, impactful research into programming as a business.
In two decades we will still collectively say ”we are learning so much”, ignoring that fact.
tptacek 10 hours ago [-]
The reasonable concern people have about AI eliminating coder jobs is that they will make existing coders drastically more productive. "Productivity" is literally defined as the number X of people required to do Y amount of stuff.
I'm not sure how seriously people take the threat of non-coding vibe-coders. Maybe they should! The most important and popular programming environment in the world is the spreadsheet. Before spreadsheets, everything that is today a spreadsheet was a program some programmer had to write.
simonw 10 hours ago [-]
I'm still optimistic that the net effect of making existing programmers drastically more productive is that our value goes up, because we can produce more value for other people.
dfxm12 10 hours ago [-]
The economy has taught us that when there is an excess of worker productivity, it leads to layoffs. It certainly does not lead to raises.
ryandrake 9 hours ago [-]
No software company I have ever worked at had an excess of worker productivity. There were always at least 3-5X as much work needing to be done, bugs needing to be fixed, features that needed to be implemented than engineers to do it. Backlogs just grew and grew until you just gave up and mass-closed issues because they were 10 years old.
If AI coding improves productivity, it might move us closer to having 2X as much work as we can possibly do instead of 3X.
SoftTalker 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think you can judge "work needing to be done" by looking at backlog. Tickets are easy to enter. If they were really important, they'd get done or people would be hired to do them (employed or contracted). 10 year old issues that never got attention were just never that important to begin with.
lmm 9 hours ago [-]
That sounds like the famous lump of labour fallacy. When something's cheaper people often spend more on it (Jevons paradox).
bgwalter 8 hours ago [-]
This "fallacy" is from 1891 and assumes jobs that require virtually no retraining. A farm worker could ion theory clean the factory floor or do one small step in an assembly line within a week.
Nowadays we already have bullshit jobs that keep academics employed. Retraining takes several years.
With "AI" the danger is theoretically limited because it creates more bureaucracy and reduces productivity. The problem is that it is used as an excuse for layoffs.
kasey_junk 9 hours ago [-]
Do you have a citation for that?
ohthatsnotright 9 hours ago [-]
What a strange thing to ask for a citation on when CEO pay, stock buy backs and corporate dividends are at all time highs while worker pay and honestly just affording to live continue to crater.
kasey_junk 8 hours ago [-]
Productivity is up and labor wages are up. That’s why I asked. It wasn’t an attempt at a rebuttal it was a request for reading material as it’s a heterodox view.
The normal conversation is that productivity growth has slowed and the divide has increased, not that more productivity creates lower outcomes in real terms.
It's economic jargon for what people are paid per hour for working (which can include non-direct payments such as healthcare and pensions), adjusted for inflation (for economists, "real" just means divided by CPI, as opposed to "nominal" which are the actual dollar amounts in the past).
I mean, I hate a lazy "citation needed" FUD attack as much as (really likely way more than) anyone, but with a bit more context I do think a citation is needed, as the correct citation in the other direction is (as someone else noted) Jevon's paradox: when you make it easier to X, you make it so people can use X in ever more contexts, and you make it so that the things which previously needed something way harder than X are suddenly possible, and the result -- as much in software development as any other field: it seems like every year it becomes MUCH easier to do things, due to better tools -- always seems to result in MORE demand, not less... we even see the slow raising of "table stakes" for software, such that a website or app is off-putting and lame to a lot of users if it isn't doing the things that require at least some effort: instead of animated transitions and giant images maybe the next phase of this is that the website has to be an interactive assistant white-glove AI experience--or some crazy AR-capable thing--requiring tons of engineering effort to pull off, but now possible for your average website due to AI coding. Meanwhile, the other effects you are talking about all started before AI coding even sort of worked well, and so have very little to do with AI: they are more related to monetary policy shifts, temporary pandemic demand spikes, and that R&D tax law change.
danielscrubs 19 minutes ago [-]
But when everyone started to produce SEO slop, the web died. It’s harder than ever to find truly passionate, single subject blogs from professionals for example.
The AI slop will make it harder for the small guys without marketing budget (some lucky few will still make it though). It will slowly kill the app ecosystem, untill all we reluctantly trust is FANG. The app pricing reflects it.
EZ-E 7 hours ago [-]
I rather think that LLMs help to write code faster, and also enables folks that would not program to do so in some capacity. In the end, you end up with more code in the world, and you end up needing more programmers to maintain/keep it running at scale.
alganet 10 hours ago [-]
> everything that is today a spreadsheet was a program some programmer had to write
That is incorrect, sir.
First, because many problems were designed to fit into spreadsheets (human systems designed around a convenient tool). It is much more likely that several spreadsheets were _paper_ before, not custom written programs. For a lot of cases, that paper work was adapted directly to spreadsheets, no one did a custom program intermediate.
Second, because many problems we have today could be solved by simple spreadsheets, but they often aren't. Instead, people choose to hire developers instead, for a variety of reasons.
tptacek 9 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure we're really disagreeing about anything here. If you think spreadsheets didn't displace any programmers at all, that's contrary to my intuition, but not necessarily wrong --- especially because of the explosion of extrinsic demand for computer programming.
steveBK123 11 hours ago [-]
Google translate is a good example too in terms of better-than-nothing to the completely uninitiated, helpful to someone with a little knowledge, and obviously not a replacement for a professional. That is - the more you know, the more you see its failures.
I know enough Japanese to talk like a small child, make halting small talk in a taxi, and understand a dining menu / restaurant signage broadly. I also have been enough times to understand context where literal translation to English fails to convey the actual message.. for example in cases where they want to say no to a customer but can't literally say no.
I have found Google Translate to be similarly magical and dumb for 15 years of traveling to Japan without any huge improvements other than speed. The visual real-time image OCR stuff was an app they purchased (Magic Lens?) that I had previously used.
So who knows, maybe LLM coding stays in a similar pretty-good-never-perfect state for a decade.
9 hours ago [-]
jf 10 hours ago [-]
> The visual real-time image OCR stuff was an app they purchased (Magic Lens?) that I had previously used.
> So who knows, maybe LLM coding stays in a similar pretty-good-never-perfect state for a decade.
I think this is definitely a possibility, but I think the technology is still WAY too early to know that if the "second AI winter" the author references never comes, that we still wouldn't discover tons of other use cases that would change a lot.
I think you're right, AI art and AI software dev are not analogous. The point of art is to create art. There are a lot of traditions and cultural expectations around this, and many of them depend on the artist involved. The human in the loop is important.
Meanwhile, the point of software development is not to write code. It's to get a working application that accomplishes a task. If this can be done, even at low quality, without hiring as many people, there is no more value to the human. In HN terms, there is no moat.
It's the difference between the transition from painting to photography and the transition from elevator operators to pushbuttons.
bgwalter 9 hours ago [-]
I'm currently getting two types of ads on YouTube: One is about how the official Israeli Gaza humanitarian efforts are totally fine and adequate (launched during the flotilla with Greta Thunberg).
The other is about an "AI" website generator, spamming every video at the start.
I wonder what kind of honest efforts would require that kind of marketing.
15123123 3 hours ago [-]
yeah I think the case for AI art is very different. I see major brands, even those who has been very generous with artist commission like McDonald Japan. is now using AI art instead.
candiddevmike 12 hours ago [-]
I think you could extrapolate it and say folks are primarily using GenAI for things they aren't considered a specialist in.
jezzamon 8 hours ago [-]
I was thinking about this comparison recently along a slightly different axis: One challenge when working with translations (human or machine translations) as that you can't vet whether it's correct or not yourself. So you just have to either trust the translation and hope it's the best. It's a lot easier to trust a person than a machine, though I have had someone message me once to say "this translation of your article is so bad I feel like the translator did not put in a serious attempt"
It's similar to vibe coding where the user truly doesn't know how to create the same thing themselves: You end up with output that you have no way of knowing it's correct, and you just have to blindly trust it and hope for the best. And that just doesn't work for many situations. So you still need expertise anyway (either yours or someone else's)
vasco 4 hours ago [-]
> So you just have to either trust the translation and hope it's the best. It's a lot easier to trust a person than a machine
Only because you think the machine will be incorrect. If I have a large multiplication to do it's much easier to trust the calculator than a mathematician, and that's all due to my perception of the calculator accuracy.
eurleif 7 hours ago [-]
You can kinda validate machine translation by doing a circular translation, A->B->A. It's not a perfect test, but it's a reasonably strong signal.
ruszki 5 hours ago [-]
I’m learning German, and I quite often use this test. Google Translate fails this most of the times. This is true even between Hungarian and English. The difference with the latter one is, that I can properly choose between the options given to me, if there are, without translating it back. Especially, that that passed many times when it gave terrible translations.
So this test fails many times, and even when not, the translation is still usually not good. However, when you don’t care about nuances, it’s still fine usually. And also translation seems to be better if the text is larger. Translating a single word does almost always fail. Translating a whole article is usually fine. But even there it matters what you translate. Translating the Austrian subreddit fails quite often. Sometimes completely for whole large posts. Translating news is better.
numpad0 5 hours ago [-]
Round tripping is definitely better than nothing, but it lets through a lot of "engrish" errors with multi-meaning words and with implied perspectives. Cape as in clothing and cape as in pointy seasides, general as in military rank vs general as in generic, etc.
e.g. "Set up database as: [read replica]" and "Database setup complete: [a replica was loaded.]" may translate into a same string in some language.
stevage 8 hours ago [-]
Well no, you can run the output. That gives you some measure of correctness.
danpalmer 8 hours ago [-]
No I think the original comment is correct. You need to be able to evaluate the result.
The goal of software is not to compile and run, it's to solve a problem for the user when running. If you don't know enough about the problem to be able to assess the output of the program then you can't trust that it's actually doing the right thing.
I've seen code generated by LLMs that runs, does something, and that the something would be plausible to a layperson, but that I know from domain knowledge and knowing the gotchas involved in programming that it's not actually correct.
I think the comparison with translation is a very apt one.
neilv 10 hours ago [-]
Some additional things that translators do (which I recall from a professional translator friend, put in my own words):
* Idioms (The article mentions in passing that this isn't so much a difficulty in Norwegian->English, but of course idioms usually don't translate as sentences)
* Cultural references (From arts, history, cuisine, etc. You don't necessarily substitute, but you might have to hint if it has relevant connotations that would be missed.)
* Cultural values (What does "freedom" mean to this one nation, or "passion" to this other, or "resilience" to another, and does that influence translation)
* Matching actor in dubbing (Sometimes the translation you'd use for a line of a dialogue in a book doesn't fit the duration and speaking movements of an actor in a movie, so the translator changes the language to fit better.)
* Artful prose. (AFAICT, LLMs really can't touch this, unless they're directly plagiarizing the right artful bit)
NicuCalcea 11 hours ago [-]
While it's just anecdotal evidence, I have translator friends and work has indeed been drying up over the past decade, and that has only accelerated with the introduction of LLMs. Just check any forum or facebook group for translators, it's all doom and gloom about AI. See this reddit thread, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/comments/173okwg...
While professionals still produce much better quality translations, the demand for everything but the most sensitive work is nearly gone. Would you recommend your offspring get into the industry?
tossaway0 8 hours ago [-]
I imagine even for professional teams with clients that need proper translations, LLMs have made it so one person can do the work of many. The difference between the quality of former automatic translations and LLM translations is huge; you couldn't rely on auto translation at all.
Now a professional service only needs a reviewer to edit what the LLM produces. You can even ask the LLM to translate in certain tones, dialects, etc. and they do it very well.
ryao 9 hours ago [-]
> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English) where a brit might say “Could I please have some potatoes?”.
I find “I will have the potatoes” to be perfectly fine English and not haughty in the slightest. Is this a difference between British English and American English?
jvanderbot 9 hours ago [-]
When ordering, "I will have" sounds reasonable.
When asking someone to pass them to you, just imagine them turning to you, looking you in the eye, and asserting "I will have the potatoes" like it's some kind of ultimatum. Yes, that is strange.
roxolotl 7 hours ago [-]
It’s such an anachronistic statement I laughed out loud reading your comment. I even was taught that you can’t pass things mid air. You place the potatoes down between each person required to pass them to the person who wants them.
noobermin 9 hours ago [-]
Americans are extremely polite, and American English is replete with niceties in everyday speech. It's funny, having been a tourist abroad, it's only living in a significantly non American country for a few years that lead me to realise this. I even lived in another country albeit a former US colony for ten years and didn't even notice it there given American influence.
I stopped saying, stuff "I would like a latte today" or more Midwestern (could I get a latte today etc) in singapore because people would just get confused. Same with being too polite when recieving things. There's ways to be polite but it usually involves less words because anything else confuses people.
danpalmer 8 hours ago [-]
> Americans are extremely polite
Having grown up in the UK and living in Australia, I do not find Americans polite. To me, politeness is "please", "thank you", "may I have", etc, whereas "I would like a latte today" reads to me as a demand. In context it's fine (it stands out a bit but not in a problematic way), it's not particularly rude, but in general just stating your desires is not considered polite in my experience in UK/AU.
There are some other parts of American English that may be considered polite, I notice a lot of US folks addressing me as "sir" for example, but this sort of thing comes off as insincere or even sarcastic/rude.
I know this is how people communicate so they don't really bother me, I'm used to them and accept that different people have different expectations. I also understand that Americans might believe they are being polite and consider me to be rude, but I think this is why blanket statements like "Americans are extremely polite" are just missing so much cultural nuance.
not_a_bot_4sho 6 hours ago [-]
America is not a monolith. Spend a day in New York and a day in Seattle. Language is the same but politeness carries widely.
danpalmer 6 hours ago [-]
I agree. The parent comment was treating America as a monolith, and my point is that there are many different contexts around the world that will interpret the described use of language in a very different way, and often not read it as polite.
rr808 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe its a NY thing I was shocked when I heard people in restaurants saying "I want...". Growing up outside the US "want" is a very impolite word. People in US are polite but direct, usually English/Irish people are much less direct.
jjani 3 hours ago [-]
To give you an even more shocking one; in Korean, known for its various formality and politeness levels, the standard form when ordering is saying "Give me X"!
ryao 8 hours ago [-]
Coincidentally, I am in NY. That said, “I want…” when ordering seems fine to me too.
sudahtigabulan 9 hours ago [-]
> could I get a latte today actually
To me (non-American) the above sounds like sarcasm, not politeness. Adding "today" and/or "actually" could mean you've had it with their delays.
I like to joke that Americans always seem to find ways to get offended by innocuous things, but in this case the joke is on me.
bluefirebrand 5 hours ago [-]
Tone of voice and mannerism matters here a lot
To me (Canadian, not American) "Could I get a latte today actually" sounded something like "Normally I get something other than a latter but actually today I would like a latte instead"
Not rude at all, but kind of assumes some context
zzo38computer 4 hours ago [-]
I would think that it depends on the context.
To me it seems (without any context) that it might mean that you changed your mind about what day you wanted it. This does not seem to make sense in many contexts, though.
ryao 3 hours ago [-]
It makes sense if you are a regular and today, you want something other than your usual.
3eb7988a1663 5 hours ago [-]
American - I fully agree with your interpretation. Throwing on the time component gives up all pretense of being polite.
1 hours ago [-]
SoftTalker 6 hours ago [-]
It would also depend on the tone of voice and even body language used.
devnullbrain 11 hours ago [-]
>All this is not to say Google Translate is doing a bad job
Google Translate is doing a bad job.
The Chrome translate function regularly detects Traditional Chinese as Japanese. While many characters are shared, detecting the latter is trivial by comparing unicode code points - Chinese has no kana. The function used to detect this correctly, but it has regressed.
Most irritatingly of all, it doesn't even let you correct its mistakes: as is the rule for all kinds of modern software, the machine thinks it knows best.
simonw 11 hours ago [-]
That doesn't sound like a problem with Google Translate, it sounds like a problem with Google Chrome. I believe Chrome uses this small on-device model to detect the language before offering to translate it: https://github.com/google/cld3#readme
jjani 3 hours ago [-]
It's only a matter of time before they have an LLM both 1. cheap 2. fast 3. good enough that they'll replace Google Translate's current model with it. I'd be very surprised if they'd put more than 1 hour of maintenance into Translate's current iteration over the last 12 months.
numpad0 5 hours ago [-]
IMO, it's still not too late and it'll never be too late to split and reorganize Unicode by languages - at least split Chinese and Japanese. LLMs seem to be having issues acquiring both Chinese and Japanese at the same time. It'll make sense for both languages.
The syntaxes aren't just different but generally backwards, and, it's just my hunch but, they sometimes sound like they are confused about which modifies word which.
krackers 12 hours ago [-]
This seems like a terrible comparison since Google Translate is completely beat by DeepL, let alone LLMs. (Google Translate almost surely doesn't use an LLM, or at least not a _large_ one given its speed)
Ninjinka 12 hours ago [-]
For Google's Cloud Translation API you can choose between the standard Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model or the "Translation LLM (Google's newest highest quality LLM-style translation model)".
That’s absolutely not the point of this article. The point was that people said, once Google Translate was introduced, that translators would lose their jobs. Just like people say the same thing about developers with LLMs nowadays. The point is: they didn’t, and they won’t.
DeepL is not part of that point. Yes, maybe eventually, developers will lose their jobs to something that is an evolution of LLMs. But that’s not relevant here.
ethan_smith 5 hours ago [-]
Google Translate has actually been using neural machine translation since 2016 and integrated PaLM 2 (a large language model) in 2023 for over 100 languages, though DeepL does still outperform it in many benchmarks.
dr_dshiv 12 hours ago [-]
In my limited experience, LLMs can have issues with translation tone — but these issues are pretty easily fixed with good prompting.
I want to believe there will be even more translators in the future. I really want to believe it.
alganet 11 hours ago [-]
> easily fixed with good prompting
Can you give us an example of a typical translation question and the "good prompting" required to make the LLM consider tone?
Good, but not exactly what I expected for "easily fixed".
It includes a lot of steps and constant human evaluation between them, which implies that decisions about tone are ultimately made by whoever is prompting the LLM, not the LLMs themselves.
> "If they are generally in the style I want..."
> "choosing the sentences and paragraphs I like most from each..."
> "I also make my own adjustments to the translation as I see fit..."
> "I don’t adopt most of the LLM’s suggestions..."
> "I check it paragraph by paragraph..."
It seems like a great workflow to speed up the work of an already experienced translator, but far from being usable by a layman due to the several steps requiring specialized human supervision.
Consider the scenario presented by the blog post regarding bluntness/politeness and cultural sensitivities. Would anyone be able to use this workflow without knowing that beforehand? If you think about it, it could make the tone even worse.
camillomiller 2 hours ago [-]
>> For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s inconceivable that some future form of AI could handle context and ambiguity as well as humans do, but I do think we’re at least one more AI winter away from that, especially considering that today’s AI moguls seem to have no capacity for nuance, and care more about their tools appearing slick and frictionless than providing responsible output.
Fantastic closing paragraph! Loved the article
11 hours ago [-]
noname120 9 hours ago [-]
The article starts with a giant straw man and miscaracterisation, not sure that I want to read the rest of the article at this point
BergAndCo 7 hours ago [-]
Literally the first example is an outright lie.
> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English). Google Translate just gives the blunt direct translation.
"To will" means "it is my will", i.e. to want to, which became the future tense in English. In Norwegian is still means "want", and Google Translate indeed translates it as "I want the potatoes." If you translate the rising (pleading) intonation on "potatoes", you then have an unwritten "please?", i.e. "I want the potatoes?...", which is passable English.
Most businesses think AI code is "good enough", and that machine translation is "good enough", which tanks the entire industry because there is now more supply than demand. He says there are still plenty of translator jobs, but then justifies it as because "it’s inadvisable to subsititute (sic) Google Translate for an interpreter at a court hearing." Meaning, the thing taking away all the tech jobs temporarily (unchecked mass-migration) is the same thing keeping keeping him employed temporarily.
Kiro 4 hours ago [-]
> I see claims from one side that “I used $LLM_SERVICE_PROVIDER to make a small throwaway tool, so all programmers will be unemployed in $ARBITRARY_TIME_WINDOW”, and from the other side flat-out rejections of the idea that this type of tool can have any utility.
No, the one side is saying that all their code is written by LLMs already and that's why they think that. In fact, I would say the other side is the former ("it works for throwaway code but that's it") and that no-one is flat-out rejecting it.
banq 4 hours ago [-]
LLM=Google Translate +Context
darvinyraghpath 12 hours ago [-]
Fascinating thought piece. While I agree with the thrust of the piece: 'that llms can't really replace engineers', unfortunately the way the industry works is that the excuse of AI, however grounded in reality has been repurposed as a cudgel against actual software industry workers. Sure eventually everyone might figure out that AI can't really write code by itself - and software quality will degrade..
But unfortunately we've long been on the path of enshitification and I fear the trend will only continue.
If google's war against its own engineers has resulted in shittier software - and things start break twice a year instead of once - would anyone really blink twice?
tartoran 12 hours ago [-]
Maybe AI can't replace engineers but it surely can apply downward pressure on engineers' salaries.
lodovic 5 hours ago [-]
I don't believe that. Software has become so expensive in the last decade, that only very large enterprises and venture capitalists were still building custom applications (ymmv). LLMs make it cheaper and faster to create software - you don't need these large teams and managers anymore, just a few developers. Smaller companies will be back in the game.
bluefirebrand 5 hours ago [-]
> Smaller companies will be back in the game.
Smaller companies that can afford smaller salaries you mean?
I'm not sure that is at odds with what the post you were replying to said
carlosjobim 12 hours ago [-]
As long as the person you are talking or writing to is aware that you're not a native speaker, they will understand that you won't be able to follow conventions around polite languages or understand subtle nuances on their part. It's really a non issue. The finer clues of language are intended for people who are from the same culture.
DidYaWipe 2 hours ago [-]
Hopefully it tells everyone to never use this douchey term again.
autobodie 5 hours ago [-]
"Behold the impeccable nuance of my opinion"
yieldcrv 10 hours ago [-]
This is like the worst comparison since generative AI is far better at conversational translation than google translate
LLM’s will tell you idioms, slang, and the point behind it
You can take a screenshot of telegram channels for both sides of a war conflict and get all context in a minute
In classic HN fashion I’m sure I missed the point, ok translators are still in demand got it.
Google Translate has been leapfrogged by the same thing that allows for “vibecoding”
Google Translate can't, but LLMs given enough context can. I've been testing and experimenting with LLMs extensively for translation between Japanese and English for more than two years, and, when properly prompted, they are really good. I say this as someone who worked for twenty years as a freelance translator of Japanese and who still does translation part-time.
Just yesterday, as it happens, I spent the day with Claude Code vibe-coding a multi-LLM system for translating between Japanese and English. You give it a text to be translated, and it asks you questions that it generates on the fly about the purpose of the translation and how you want it translated--literal or free, adapted to the target-language culture or not, with or without footnotes, etc. It then writes a prompt based on your answers, sends the text to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, creates a combined draft from the three translations, and then sends that draft back to the three models for several rounds of revision, checking, and polishing. I had time to run only a few tests on real texts before going to bed, but the results were really good--better than any model alone when I've tested them, much better than Google Translate, and as good as top-level professional human translation.
The situation is different with interpreting, especially in person. If that were how I made my living, I wouldn't be too worried yet. But for straight translation work where the translator's personality and individual identity aren't emphasized, it's becoming increasingly hard for humans to compete.
I built something kinda similar, and made it open source. It picks the top x models based on my research, translates with them, then has a final judge model critique, compare, and synthesise a combined best translation. You can try it at https://nuenki.app/translator if you're interested, and my data is at https://nuenki.app/blog
I live in Japan. Almost every day I find myself asking things like “what does X mean in this specific setting?” or “how do I tell Y to that specific person via this specific medium?”.
Much of this can be further automated via custom instructions, so that e.g. the LMM knows that text in a particular language should be automatically translated and explained.
Great ideas. I'll think about adding those features to the system in my next vibe-coding session.
What I automated in the MVP I vibe-coded yesterday could all be done alone by a human user with access to the LLMs, of course. The point of such an app would be to guide people who are not familiar with the issues and intricacies of translation so that they can get better translations for their purposes.
I have no intention to try to commercialize my app, as there would be no moat. Anyone who wanted to could feed this thread to Claude, ask it to write a starting prompt for Claude Code, and produce a similar system in probably less time than it took me.
It can be as simple as discuss one’s own religion
I also have a few heuristics (e.g. "I can't translate" in many different languages) to detect if it deviates from that.
It works pretty well.
[0] https://nuenki.app
https://soniox.com
Disclaimer: I work for Soniox.
Lacking cultural context while reading translated texts is what made studying history finally interesting to me.
First, the Pixar thing was green pepper, not green beans: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-inside-out-has-different...
Second, the Pixar one is not "mere" translation; it is full localization because they changed the visual to match the "textual" change.
The Pokemon one is where the change was limited to the "text". The translator's heart might have been in the right place (it would depend on how integral to the story it is that the item is onigiri) but didn't have the authority to make the full breadth of changes needed for such adaptation to be successful.
> I feel confident in asserting that people who say this would not have hired a translator or learned Japanese in a world without Google Translate; they’d have either not gone to Japan at all, or gone anyway and been clueless foreigners as tourists are wont to do.
The correlation here would be something like: the people using AI to build apps previously would simply never have created an app, so it’s not affecting software development as a career as much as you first expect.
It would be like saying AI art won’t affect artists, because the people who would put in such little effort probably would never have commissioned anyone. Which may be a little true (at least in that it reduces the impact).
However, I don’t necessarily know if that’s true for software development. The ability to build software enabled huge business opportunities at very low costs. I think the key difference is this: the people who are now putting in such low effort into commissioning software maybe did hire software engineers before this, and that might throw off a lot of the numbers.
The work got easier, so what we do got more complex.
It's all cleaning up slop code. Always has been.
</tired old fart voice>
More optimistically, you can think of "user created code" as an attempt at a design document of sorts; they were trying to tell you (and the computer) what they wanted in "your language". And that dialog is the important thing.
We can never decide, we just like learning, and there is little real, impactful research into programming as a business.
In two decades we will still collectively say ”we are learning so much”, ignoring that fact.
I'm not sure how seriously people take the threat of non-coding vibe-coders. Maybe they should! The most important and popular programming environment in the world is the spreadsheet. Before spreadsheets, everything that is today a spreadsheet was a program some programmer had to write.
If AI coding improves productivity, it might move us closer to having 2X as much work as we can possibly do instead of 3X.
Nowadays we already have bullshit jobs that keep academics employed. Retraining takes several years.
With "AI" the danger is theoretically limited because it creates more bureaucracy and reduces productivity. The problem is that it is used as an excuse for layoffs.
The normal conversation is that productivity growth has slowed and the divide has increased, not that more productivity creates lower outcomes in real terms.
https://www.bls.gov/productivity/images/labor-compensation-l...
Data is collected through the National Compensation Survey: https://www.bls.gov/respondents/ncs/
The AI slop will make it harder for the small guys without marketing budget (some lucky few will still make it though). It will slowly kill the app ecosystem, untill all we reluctantly trust is FANG. The app pricing reflects it.
That is incorrect, sir.
First, because many problems were designed to fit into spreadsheets (human systems designed around a convenient tool). It is much more likely that several spreadsheets were _paper_ before, not custom written programs. For a lot of cases, that paper work was adapted directly to spreadsheets, no one did a custom program intermediate.
Second, because many problems we have today could be solved by simple spreadsheets, but they often aren't. Instead, people choose to hire developers instead, for a variety of reasons.
I know enough Japanese to talk like a small child, make halting small talk in a taxi, and understand a dining menu / restaurant signage broadly. I also have been enough times to understand context where literal translation to English fails to convey the actual message.. for example in cases where they want to say no to a customer but can't literally say no.
I have found Google Translate to be similarly magical and dumb for 15 years of traveling to Japan without any huge improvements other than speed. The visual real-time image OCR stuff was an app they purchased (Magic Lens?) that I had previously used.
So who knows, maybe LLM coding stays in a similar pretty-good-never-perfect state for a decade.
Word Lens, by Quest Visual
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_Visual
I think this is definitely a possibility, but I think the technology is still WAY too early to know that if the "second AI winter" the author references never comes, that we still wouldn't discover tons of other use cases that would change a lot.
Meanwhile, the point of software development is not to write code. It's to get a working application that accomplishes a task. If this can be done, even at low quality, without hiring as many people, there is no more value to the human. In HN terms, there is no moat.
It's the difference between the transition from painting to photography and the transition from elevator operators to pushbuttons.
The other is about an "AI" website generator, spamming every video at the start.
I wonder what kind of honest efforts would require that kind of marketing.
It's similar to vibe coding where the user truly doesn't know how to create the same thing themselves: You end up with output that you have no way of knowing it's correct, and you just have to blindly trust it and hope for the best. And that just doesn't work for many situations. So you still need expertise anyway (either yours or someone else's)
Only because you think the machine will be incorrect. If I have a large multiplication to do it's much easier to trust the calculator than a mathematician, and that's all due to my perception of the calculator accuracy.
So this test fails many times, and even when not, the translation is still usually not good. However, when you don’t care about nuances, it’s still fine usually. And also translation seems to be better if the text is larger. Translating a single word does almost always fail. Translating a whole article is usually fine. But even there it matters what you translate. Translating the Austrian subreddit fails quite often. Sometimes completely for whole large posts. Translating news is better.
e.g. "Set up database as: [read replica]" and "Database setup complete: [a replica was loaded.]" may translate into a same string in some language.
The goal of software is not to compile and run, it's to solve a problem for the user when running. If you don't know enough about the problem to be able to assess the output of the program then you can't trust that it's actually doing the right thing.
I've seen code generated by LLMs that runs, does something, and that the something would be plausible to a layperson, but that I know from domain knowledge and knowing the gotchas involved in programming that it's not actually correct.
I think the comparison with translation is a very apt one.
* Idioms (The article mentions in passing that this isn't so much a difficulty in Norwegian->English, but of course idioms usually don't translate as sentences)
* Cultural references (From arts, history, cuisine, etc. You don't necessarily substitute, but you might have to hint if it has relevant connotations that would be missed.)
* Cultural values (What does "freedom" mean to this one nation, or "passion" to this other, or "resilience" to another, and does that influence translation)
* Matching actor in dubbing (Sometimes the translation you'd use for a line of a dialogue in a book doesn't fit the duration and speaking movements of an actor in a movie, so the translator changes the language to fit better.)
* Artful prose. (AFAICT, LLMs really can't touch this, unless they're directly plagiarizing the right artful bit)
While professionals still produce much better quality translations, the demand for everything but the most sensitive work is nearly gone. Would you recommend your offspring get into the industry?
Now a professional service only needs a reviewer to edit what the LLM produces. You can even ask the LLM to translate in certain tones, dialects, etc. and they do it very well.
I find “I will have the potatoes” to be perfectly fine English and not haughty in the slightest. Is this a difference between British English and American English?
When asking someone to pass them to you, just imagine them turning to you, looking you in the eye, and asserting "I will have the potatoes" like it's some kind of ultimatum. Yes, that is strange.
I stopped saying, stuff "I would like a latte today" or more Midwestern (could I get a latte today etc) in singapore because people would just get confused. Same with being too polite when recieving things. There's ways to be polite but it usually involves less words because anything else confuses people.
Having grown up in the UK and living in Australia, I do not find Americans polite. To me, politeness is "please", "thank you", "may I have", etc, whereas "I would like a latte today" reads to me as a demand. In context it's fine (it stands out a bit but not in a problematic way), it's not particularly rude, but in general just stating your desires is not considered polite in my experience in UK/AU.
There are some other parts of American English that may be considered polite, I notice a lot of US folks addressing me as "sir" for example, but this sort of thing comes off as insincere or even sarcastic/rude.
I know this is how people communicate so they don't really bother me, I'm used to them and accept that different people have different expectations. I also understand that Americans might believe they are being polite and consider me to be rude, but I think this is why blanket statements like "Americans are extremely polite" are just missing so much cultural nuance.
To me (non-American) the above sounds like sarcasm, not politeness. Adding "today" and/or "actually" could mean you've had it with their delays.
I like to joke that Americans always seem to find ways to get offended by innocuous things, but in this case the joke is on me.
To me (Canadian, not American) "Could I get a latte today actually" sounded something like "Normally I get something other than a latter but actually today I would like a latte instead"
Not rude at all, but kind of assumes some context
To me it seems (without any context) that it might mean that you changed your mind about what day you wanted it. This does not seem to make sense in many contexts, though.
Google Translate is doing a bad job.
The Chrome translate function regularly detects Traditional Chinese as Japanese. While many characters are shared, detecting the latter is trivial by comparing unicode code points - Chinese has no kana. The function used to detect this correctly, but it has regressed.
Most irritatingly of all, it doesn't even let you correct its mistakes: as is the rule for all kinds of modern software, the machine thinks it knows best.
The syntaxes aren't just different but generally backwards, and, it's just my hunch but, they sometimes sound like they are confused about which modifies word which.
https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/advanced/translating...
DeepL also has a translation LLM, which they claim is 1.4-1.7x better than their classic model: https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/next-gen-language-model
DeepL is not part of that point. Yes, maybe eventually, developers will lose their jobs to something that is an evolution of LLMs. But that’s not relevant here.
I want to believe there will be even more translators in the future. I really want to believe it.
Can you give us an example of a typical translation question and the "good prompting" required to make the LLM consider tone?
It includes a lot of steps and constant human evaluation between them, which implies that decisions about tone are ultimately made by whoever is prompting the LLM, not the LLMs themselves.
> "If they are generally in the style I want..."
> "choosing the sentences and paragraphs I like most from each..."
> "I also make my own adjustments to the translation as I see fit..."
> "I don’t adopt most of the LLM’s suggestions..."
> "I check it paragraph by paragraph..."
It seems like a great workflow to speed up the work of an already experienced translator, but far from being usable by a layman due to the several steps requiring specialized human supervision.
Consider the scenario presented by the blog post regarding bluntness/politeness and cultural sensitivities. Would anyone be able to use this workflow without knowing that beforehand? If you think about it, it could make the tone even worse.
Fantastic closing paragraph! Loved the article
> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English). Google Translate just gives the blunt direct translation.
"To will" means "it is my will", i.e. to want to, which became the future tense in English. In Norwegian is still means "want", and Google Translate indeed translates it as "I want the potatoes." If you translate the rising (pleading) intonation on "potatoes", you then have an unwritten "please?", i.e. "I want the potatoes?...", which is passable English.
Most businesses think AI code is "good enough", and that machine translation is "good enough", which tanks the entire industry because there is now more supply than demand. He says there are still plenty of translator jobs, but then justifies it as because "it’s inadvisable to subsititute (sic) Google Translate for an interpreter at a court hearing." Meaning, the thing taking away all the tech jobs temporarily (unchecked mass-migration) is the same thing keeping keeping him employed temporarily.
No, the one side is saying that all their code is written by LLMs already and that's why they think that. In fact, I would say the other side is the former ("it works for throwaway code but that's it") and that no-one is flat-out rejecting it.
Smaller companies that can afford smaller salaries you mean?
I'm not sure that is at odds with what the post you were replying to said
LLM’s will tell you idioms, slang, and the point behind it
You can take a screenshot of telegram channels for both sides of a war conflict and get all context in a minute
In classic HN fashion I’m sure I missed the point, ok translators are still in demand got it.
Google Translate has been leapfrogged by the same thing that allows for “vibecoding”