AI and translation

[Frabjous]

I recently checked out an old German book about tanks from the library. There was a paragraph that I wanted translated so I fed it into an AI and got a decent translation.

For fun, I decided to scan the page to a pdf and feed it to the translator.
1) The section I had previously translated was different
2) The level of english of the entire page was significantly lower than the previous translation
3) It gave the page a title
4) It gave the page a subtitle
5) It said that the page was “confidential”

What is the status of AI translation?

 

[jedishrfu]

A mixed bag. Chatgpt paid seems pretty good. But others not so good.

Also it depends on the language and developers. Nuances in a language not understood by a developer have greater mistranslations than when developer teams know source and target languages intimaely.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

AI translation is very good. All the frontier models handle it well. At work we translate into more than 70 language with native reviewers using Sonnet 5 confidently and that's not even frontier. The challenge atm is still localization. Language variance can be regional and hyper local. A coursebook on Japanese is not exactly how they speak in everyday life.

 

[FactChecker]

I recently checked out an old German book about tanks from the library. There was a paragraph that I wanted translated so I fed it into an AI and got a decent translation.

You typed this in directly?

For fun, I decided to scan the page to a pdf and feed it to the translator.
1) The section I had previously translated was different

That sounds like the translation might be context-specific. I wonder if there would be a difference if only the original part was in the PDF?

2) The level of english of the entire page was significantly lower than the previous translation

Can it be that the larger amount of text caused it to do a worse job in the translation. It may be limited in the number of parameters or memory allowed for the entire task, therefore leaving less for the test part.

3) It gave the page a title
4) It gave the page a subtitle
5) It said that the page was “confidential”

That might not be surprising if the PDF contained more information.

 

[Frabjous]

You typed this in directly?

That sounds like the translation might be context-specific. I wonder if there would be a difference if only the original part was in the PDF?

Can it be that the larger amount of text caused it to do a worse job in the translation. It may be limited in the number of parameters or memory allowed for the entire task, therefore leaving less for the test part.

That might not be surprising if the PDF contained more information.

Yes, but did not include diacritical marks.

I’ll give that a try.

It was only a single page.

It was still content not included on the page.

 

[FactChecker]

It was only a single page.

I am not an expert on this, just a casual amateur. But it seems likely that any increase in the amount of text, let alone the added task of parsing PDF, might use more parameters/resources. That might hit limits and reduce the quality of the test part translation.

 

[robphy]

Here is my reply in a recent thread
physicsforums.com/threads/looking-for-an-english-translation-of-levi-civitas-1926-paper-sur-lecart-geodesique-on-the-geodesic-deviation.1084982/post-7308669
where I described my use of Google Gemini
to do OCR on a French article and do a translation together with mathematical typesetting.

 

[phyzguy]

The DeepL translator is excellent. I have fed it medical reports in Spanish as a pdf and it returns a new pdf in English which to me seems nearly perfect, including the medical jargon.

 

[Frabjous]

Per some of the suggestions-

If I just put the paragraph in the pdf, the translation was comparable to the typed version.

For the whole page pdf, if I asked it to translate line by line, the translation was better. The paragraph of interest was slightly different in this version.

 

[Dale]

I have had good experience with AI translation for my church. I do the machine translation as a rough draft and go back to make small changes. Most of the changes are for specific vocabulary words that are used in a religious context, and most of the rest are personal style preferences. So the original translation feels like a translation from a human without any domain-specific knowledge

 

[Dale]

I decided to scan the page to a pdf and feed it to the translator.

I wonder if the pdf made each line into a separate paragraph. So the second translation would have been translating a lot of incomplete sentences

 

[Frabjous]

I wonder if the pdf made each line into a separate paragraph. So the second translation would have been translating a lot of incomplete sentences

I think it interpreted paragraph by paragraph because it first output a German paragraph followed by the translation, then the next German paragraph …

My instructions were “line by line” as per one of the suggestions.

 

[FactChecker]

I think it interpreted paragraph by paragraph because it first output a German paragraph followed by the translation, then the next German paragraph …

My instructions were “line by line” as per one of the suggestions.

I think that's smart on its part. Line by line loses too much context, whereas a new paragraph already indicates some change of subject or context, so it is more likely to give the appropriate context for the translation.