alt Hacker News> I'm not sure what the solution here
The solution is to use a translator rather than a hallucinatory text generator. Google Translate is exceptionally good at maintaining naturalness when you put a multi-sentence/multi-paragraph block through it -- if you're fluent in another language, try it out!
Replies
You are aware that insofar as AI chat apps are "hallucinatory text generator(s)", then so is Google Translate, right?
(while AFAICT Google hasn't explicitly said so, it's almost certainly also powered by an autoregressive transformer model, just like ChatGPT)
Google Translate doesn't hold a candle to LLMs at translating between even common languages.
IMO chatgpt is a much better translator. Especially if you’re using one of their normal models like 5.1. I’ve used it many times with an obscure and difficult slavic language that i’m fluent in for example, and chatgpt nailed it whereas google translate sounded less natural.
The big difference? I could easily prompt the LLM with “i’d like to translate the following into language X. For context this is a reply to their email on topic Y, and Z is a female.”
Doing even a tiny bit of prompting will easily get you better results than google translate. Some languages have words with multiple meanings and the context of the sentence/topic is crucial. So is gender in many languages! You can’t provide any hints like that to google translate, especially if you are starting with an un-gendered language like English.
I do still use google translate though. When my phone is offline, or translating very long text. LLM’s perform poorly with larger context windows.
Google translate used to be the best, but it's essentially outdated technology now, surpassed by even small open-weight multilingual LLMs.
Caveat: The remaining thing to watch out for is that some LLMs are not -by default- prompted to translate accurately due to (indeed) hallucination and summarization tendencies.
* Check a given LLM with language-pairs you are familiar with before you commit to using one in situations you are less familiar with.
* always proof-read if you are at all able to!
Ultimately you should be responsible for your own posts.