logoalt Hacker News

JeremyNTyesterday at 9:25 PM0 repliesview on HN

Honestly, translations of fiction are themselves creative works, and the translator needs to really understand both cultures and needs to write cohesively throughout the work. I'm not sure this is even really a question of "can it translate" so much as "can it create a good work of fiction" which is a much higher bar. So maybe the model can mimic the style (especially given that it was probably trained on existing translations) but could it really do so from scratch in a way that is actually compelling? I'm not so sure.

Of course as for the poor OP... is this a majority of what working translators are paid to do?

I suspect a lot of translation is just grunt work - technical and business documents. The lack of a cohesive voice with considered style is perhaps not really much of an issue in those. The expectations are just much lower; text that conveys the basic meaning is a much lower bar to clear.

She's probably better than a bot at that stuff, at least for now, but my concern is that it won't be "enough" better for businesses to justify her continued employment. And this is my general feeling about this stuff across society, in basically all domains.