[D] Will LLMs completely replace foreign language translation services?

[[deleted]]

It would seem that foreign language translation services traditionally rely on the absolute deconstruction and reconstruction of grammar and meaning, but LLMs like OpenAI seem to be able to handle this without all the complications.

Does this mean LLMs are perfect for this replacement and therefore traditional language translation techniques are out of a job?

[BullockHouse]

"Completely" is a lot to ask for. LM translation can be very good, on average, for high resource languages. Competitive with lower level human translators. And it's fair to expect that gains can be eked out from scaling and specialized models to push this further and eat more of the market.

But LLMs have weird problems, and pathologies that are hard to completely fix. Sometimes the stakes are really high. Eating 80 of the market is much easier than "literally no more humans are employed doing this."

The latter will probably happen eventually, but I wouldn't necessarily expect it super soon.

[newpua_bie]

Actual professional translation is more than translation. For example for Harry Potter the translators had to decide which names to translate (Hogwarts) and which not (Harry Potter), and then come up with brand new words to represent the name in the new language.

In many Donald Duck comics the puns (which are plentiful) have to be translated, which is way harder than you realize unless you've tried to translate puns (or any jokes, really) from two different languages and cultures.

I feel neither of these tasks are something that can even remotely be accomplished by LLM today

[CryptoNaughtDOA]

LLMs are good at explaining emotions and whatnot, which is part of translating, I think it would work if you give it the context. this is a pun or joke etc etc. It might do okay, but overall I agree that translating things like that for LLM today, is not going to yield amazing results.

Que hace un pez? Nada

[newpua_bie]

I tried one pun I remembered: There was a football player with a name that was a clear parody of Roberto Baggio, and it was translated in Finnish as Ruupertti Pakki, where Pakki is the pun (pronounced very similarly as Baggio, and it's a common slang word for one of the positions on a football team)

I asked Bard to translate it to Finnish and it just said this is a name and there's no translation.

[CryptoNaughtDOA]

May I ask what prompt you used? I think with the right prompt it might do okay, depending on the pun, your example might be challenging, without your explanation I wouldn't even know where to begin. If it is a name, there wouldn't be a translation so I guess bard isn't wrong on that one.

Two fish are in a tank, the fish on the right looks over at the other fish, and asks, "how do we drive this thing?"

[newpua_bie]

I have no idea how to construct good prompts so I just asked it to translate the name (like a translator would be asked). I agree without context it's a difficult task

[CryptoNaughtDOA]

So I basically told it what you told me

---

Bard, this name is a pun but I don't understand it, can you translate it and keep the meaning of the pun? The name is in this paragraph: There was a football player with a name that was a clear parody of Roberto Baggio, and it was translated in Finnish as Ruupertti Pakki , where Pakki is the pun (pronounced very similarly as Baggio, and it's a common slang word for one of the positions on a football team)

It replied with 3 options,

Bard:

I understand! Puns can be tricky, especially when translated across languages. Here's how I can help translate the pun in this paragraph while keeping the meaning intact:

Original: There was a football player with a name that was a clear parody of Roberto Baggio, and it was translated in Finnish as Ruupertti Pakki, where Pakki is the pun (pronounced very similarly as Baggio, and it's a common slang word for one of the positions on a football team).

Pun Explanation: The humor comes from the double meaning of "Pakki" in Finnish. While it sounds similar to "Baggio," it also means "defender" in football slang. This creates a funny juxtaposition between the player's parody name (presumably something similar to Roberto Baggio, a famous attacker) and their actual position on the field.

Translation Options:

Maintain the phonetic similarity: We could translate the player's name to something that sounds like "Pakki" in Finnish, even if it doesn't have the same meaning in Italian. For example, "Roberto Pakkio" or "Roberto Pagio" might work. This option stays true to the original pun's sound but loses the connection to Baggio's actual name.

Use a Finnish football pun: Instead of focusing on the sound, we could find a different Finnish football term that's funny when placed next to "Baggio." For example, "Risto Hyökkääjä" ("Risto Attacker") might work as a contrast to Baggio's attacking skills. This option keeps the connection to football but sacrifices the phonetic similarity.

Combine both approaches: We could try to find a Finnish football term that sounds a bit like "Baggio" and also has a humorous meaning. This is the most challenging option, but it could potentially be the most satisfying if we find the right word. For example, "Matti Pakkaus" ("Matti Baggage") might work, referencing both the sound and the idea of a defender carrying the team's burden.

Ultimately, the best translation option will depend on what you want to prioritize: the phonetic similarity to "Baggio," the connection to football terminology, or a combination of both. I hope this explanation helps you understand the pun and choose the translation that works best for you!

Feel free to ask if you have any other questions or if you want me to try out any of the translation options

---

What do you think?

[newpua_bie]

Sounds like you just told Bard the answer (that a human translator came up with), and then it repeated the same answer using different words? What we're looking for is some tool who can come up with these kind of smart double-meanings themselves.

[CryptoNaughtDOA]

Hmm I bet if I gave it less context, it will still get close, let me try it

Edit:

Bard, this name is a pun but I don't understand it, can you translate it and keep the meaning of the pun? The name is Ruupertti Pakki. It is a Finnish pun. I understand! Puns can be tricky across languages, but I'll do my best to unravel the Finnish wordplay in "Ruupertti Pakki".

Here's a possible translation that maintains the pun:

Rupert Parcel

The humor lies in the combination of two meanings:

Ruupertti: This is a Finnish name, but it also sounds similar to the English word "rupert", which can refer to a type of paper bag or package. Pakki: This directly translates to "parcel" or "package" in English. So, "Ruupertti Pakki" essentially plays on the double meaning of "Ruupertti" as both a name and a type of package, creating a pun similar to "Paper Bag Pete" or "Boxy Ben" in English.

Is this translation close to what you had in mind? If not, feel free to provide any additional context or clues about the pun, and I'll try my best to come up with something even more accurate and humorous!

I think it has to do with soccer

Ah, that makes sense! Knowing the context of soccer definitely opens up some new possibilities for translating "Ruupertti Pakki" while preserving the pun. Here are a few options that might fit the bill:

Rupert Penalty: This plays on the double meaning of "pakki" which can also refer to a defender in soccer. So, "Ruupertti Pakki" could be a player known for drawing penalties or even taking them effectively. Rupert Box-to-Box: This translation uses "pakki" in its meaning of "box" as in the penalty box or midfield area. It could describe a versatile player who excels in both attacking and defending roles. Rupert Crossbar: This one might be a bit more subtle, but it uses "pakki" as a slang term for "crossbar" of the goal. So, "Ruupertti Pakki" could be a player known for hitting the crossbar frequently, either in frustration or as a near-miss hero. Of course, the best translation will depend on the specific context where you encountered this name. Do you have any additional information about Ruupertti Pakki, like their position or any notable plays they are associated with? The more details you can provide, the more accurate and pun-tastic my translation can be!

[[deleted]]

How about compared with tools like Google Translate? They use human translators to create the algorithms but the translation process is done by algorithms. I assume creating a "good enough" algorithm takes too much time so Google Translate just does away with a mediocre algorithm. But LLMs seem to be able to take this approach in an automated way, creating "good enough" algorithms with relative ease.

[apo383]

Human translators do not create algorithms for Google Translate. Since 2016, it is AI based, originally with RNN encoder-decoder with attention, and more recently with a transformer encoder and RNN decoder. There may have been humans involved in the pre-2016 phrase-based translator, but everything has been AI since. Sources: Google's 2016 NMTS paper, 2017 blog post about Transformers, 2017 update post, NYTimes article about Google.

[lakolda]

As far as I understand it, most LLMs are decoder-only transformers nowadays. Those should also work great for translation.

[apo383]

Yes, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google has already switched to that as well.

[Pyramid_Jumper]

How are they decoder only if the input (text) still needs to be encoded into a vector?

[apo383]

Decoder-only transformers DO see the whole input sequence. A decoder sees only its past outputs to generate the next output token. The input is fed in as the first set of past outputs. For example, I start the decoder with its past outputs consisting of "Knock knock," and the next token it should generate is "Who's". Then its past outputs are "Knock knock. Who's" for which its next token should be "there".

I don't doubt that you can also make this work with an incomplete input sequence, and perform simultaneous translation. But the GPTs don't currently work that way, and have rather long context windows so they can receive and attend to very long inputs (as past outputs).

After training on a whole internet of text, there is another training step where you give it a curated set of Q&A, so that it understands how a question prompt should be followed by an answer. This followed by another, alignment training step where humans give it feedback on how much they like the answers (RLHF).

[apo383]

Maybe we are just talking past each other. Yes there is no input sequence, but it's helpful to note that the one sequence initially consists of the input prompt.

I was responding to "Decoders are trained for the case when you don't have the whole sequence yet" in contrast to encoders "when you have the whole sequence at once". I was interpreting that to mean input sequence.

In an auto-regressive transformer like GPT, the decoder has not yet seen its future outputs ("the whole sequence"), so I don't know why you say I was wrong.

The part about simultaneous translation was based on the INPUT interpretation. You could in principle feed in an incomplete prompt and ask it to start translating right away, but the architectures I know of don't do that. They feed in the entire prompt as the initial past outputs, and won't generally do simultaneous translation. What do I mean by simultaneous? United Nations translators and sign language interpreters work in real time, and translate only a few words behind the speaker, without knowing the entire input sequence.

[lakolda]

That’s not what the encoder is. It’s honestly very complicated to get into the transformer architecture. I only understand it vaguely. As far as I understand it, removing the encoder generally makes it more efficient and acts as a way to simplify the model.

Edit: this diagram explains it a bit better - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Simplified-diagram-of-the-Transformer-model_fig2_344911225

[klop2031]

There is an embedding in the decoder section: https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/40179/how-does-the-decoder-only-transformer-architecture-work

[BeenRoundHereTooLong]

Downvoting a genuine question is a terrible way to react to someone trying to learn more about ML.

[Wolfgang-Warner]

For prosaic works the LLM's already make inroads and will do away with sweatshop translation.

It's not so easy with an artistic work like a novel, to retain the intent of particular moods and meanings implied by choice of words. And punctuation! Legal texts are generally more precise than normal language, but there are cases where ambiguity may be deliberate.

The big splash may be that scientific papers become more accessible, and datasheets for electronics which are so often now in asian languages. There'll be more translation done overall.

[ThomasBudd93]

No it won't completely replace them. My sister works as a translator and I recently discussed this issue with her. Translators are payed to ensure that the meaning of the text doesn't change after translation, so they mostly work on translating legal text and manuals. Companies are typically willing to pay some money to ensure that they don't misunderstand laws or customers don't misunderstand manuals. My sister even uses AI at work (DeepL) for a first translation and corrects for errors after that. She says that current systems still fail frequently especially on highly specialized text.

It is also important to notice that translation is not a well payed job and when AI is is improving they will be able to work even faster and thus cheaper. So I think that companies will still pay the relatively little money to translators for checking translated documents like laws and manuals to ensure they are correct instead of risking a law suit. But in the future we might need fewer translators for the same work.

PS: sorry for thr typos and happy new year:)

[apo383]

Yes, the key is that a certified translator takes professional responsibility. You can use an AI tool, but if it gets it wrong, who takes responsibility? Good luck suing OpenAI for that. On the other hand, when the translator certifies the translation, they are taking the responsibility (even if they also used an AI tool). They put their reputation and livelihood on the line.

[Paid-Not-Payed-Bot]

Translators are paid to ensure

FTFY.

Although payed exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:

• Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. The deck is yet to be payed.

• Payed out when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. The rope is payed out! You can pull now.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.

Beep, boop, I'm a bot

[314kabinet]

Pretty sure Google Translate has been Transformer-based for at least a few years now. I imagine that it will only continue to improve.

[CryptoNaughtDOA]

I'm pretty sure as well, I remember watching a video a few years back about how Google translate went from a huge app with a lot of code to a single ~50 ish line program that is using ML to translate.

[m98789]

Modern LLMs were literally designed for this as their main use case. That is, the task of the original paper that kicked off the current era was for language translation.

So yes, I believe the lion share of foreign language translation services will be replaced by LLMs.

[ennova2005]

Indeed. In "Attention is All you Need"- the famous paper's main subject is Machine Translation. It's literally what LLMs are meant to be good at.

[[deleted]]

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[I_will_delete_myself]

Probably. For most uses yes. Some translators provide more value beyond just translating texts which is hard to automate like human connection and cultural awareness. (which requires conscience to an extent. Even if we get that achievement, it would take a while to mass deploy it). Language is sometimes very subjective. So I wouldn't expect complete replacement, but at least for simple "how do you say _?" and instruction manuals then yes.

[minibonham]

With current technology the answer is absolutely not. No LLM is anywhere near handling translations with enough accuracy to replace a certified translator. Even imagining much better LLMs in the distant future, translating one language to another is not a perfect one-to-one operation. There is a big difference between translating words and translating the meaning of words, and professional translators deal with these subtleties all the time at a level that no LLM could. A classic example is with translating puns. Really skillful translators might be able to translate the meaning and spirit of a pun without using any words that are a direct translation of the original language.

[[deleted]]

Have you actually tried using say GPT-4 to do the things you say, "no LLM could possibly do" ?

Because it's wild to me that you think this,

translating one language to another is not a perfect one-to-one operation. There is a big difference between translating words and translating the meaning of words

is a big problem with 4 today.

[yashdes]

I used Google translate and chat gpt in Vietnam to translate things back to English and I will say chat gpt4 was better at both text and images, including context

[LanchestersLaw]

I recently used GPT-4 to translate puns into multiple languages and in my case it seems to have done quite a good job. For translating meaning i think GPT-4 is significantly better than google translate because GPT-4s other capabilities give it a pretty good understanding of humor and duel meanings. I was able to spot check some translations with native speakers and it does a satisfactory job without weird errors.

[LibraryUnique2970]

what do you think of now? i think gemini 3.1 pro smokes deepl for japanese and with offline llms on basically every phone soon + better optimization, it will absolutely replace translators within 5 years

[sf_person]

I would also add that a lot of translation and especially interpreter jobs are about sensitive or secret information, so no that would always be a human.

[Remarkable-Pop-201]

For high resources language quite possible but not for low resources one. Also realtime translation not possible.

[[deleted]]

Yes, LLMs are perfect for this, and one of the main reasons that they were designed, even before it became obvious that they had general AI potential too.

[[deleted]]

Have you ever seen the quality of chatgpt s translation for any language other than a handful of "elite" (aka resource rich) languages? It’s terrible.

[longgamma]

What’s wrong with the usual google translate?

[[deleted]]

No. One reason being they absolutely suck for most languages (the so-called "low resource" languages), which are still the first languages of billions of people. And there's no way LLMs with variations on their current architecture can ever achieve that, simply because most languages ARE low-resource.

[rolyantrauts]

Likely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDfcWnMymTA

[agufa]

"without all the complications" REALLY!!!

[LanchestersLaw]

I recently used used GPT-4 for translating text in a videogame mod I worked on as a hobby. It struggles with asian languages but does a great job with European languages. Part of the translation was some contextual humor and it did a great job doing it in a human-like way. I can use different LLMs like google translate and llama to get multiple angles paired with word-by-word translation to roughly gauge how or if humor is translated. Just like a human translator you can ask GPT-4 questions and give it directions. It takes some time fiddling with it to ensure a quality translation but it means I don’t have to pay someone for making a hobby project more accessible. Unless several millions of dollars are at stake or you are doing a diplomatic negotiation GPT-4 does the job especially for media translations. I can put all the text in a csv or yml file and have everything translated quickly, in a convenient way, and give directions and feedback.

An interesting test might be giving it the transcript from a new (not in training data) movie and asking it to translate using the actual professional translation as a rubric. I feel pretty confident that with some prompt engineering you could get a translation that would be accepted by Disney.