Ohhhhhhhhhhhh
Mairzy doze
and doesy doze
and little lambzie divey....
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47639410
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47644545
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I'm Tired
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2026-03-11 02:10:47
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2026-03-08 16:02:32
47232326
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when you realize you lost an hour and didn’t actually sleep in a little bit
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47644493
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When I grow too old to dream, I'll have you to remember
#SigmundRomberg #NelsonEddy
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2026-03-11 01:57:34
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47645274
Ya, you gotta go 'way 'way back for some of these. Who the hell even remembers Sigmund Romberg anyway? Well, try on Johnny Tillotson on for size:
Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On
--so darlin', I can dream on it too.
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2026-03-11 01:55:10
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47644573
Any song from Carol Burnett's "Once Upon A Mattress"
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2026-03-11 01:50:39
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47644380
Whenever I want you all I have to do is dream
#EverlyBrothers #NoEffort
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2026-03-11 01:46:38
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47641775
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH
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2026-03-11 01:46:32
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47641787
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europesays.com/2837210/ Surge in LNG and palm oil prices could be ‘blessing’ to Malaysian economy, experts say #Conflict/War #EconomicAffairs #Energy #GasPrice #geopolitics #LiquefiedNaturalGas #lng #LNGPrice #Malaysia #NaturalGas #TheStar
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europesays.com/2837210/ Surge in LNG and palm oil prices could be ‘blessing’ to Malaysian economy, experts say #Conflict/War #EconomicAffairs #Energy #GasPrice #geopolitics #LiquefiedNaturalGas #lng #LNGPrice #Malaysia #NaturalGas #TheStar
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2026-03-11 03:01:29
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47641793
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Finally something about this war that is truly amazing…
in reply to Jay Kuo
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Finally something about this war that is truly amazing…
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yet another sign that JK rowling is the author writing the simulation
Captain Sandy McSandface!
Wacky names like this make me recall long ago Pentagon spokesman Flex Plexico
Just a nickname, his given name is Andrew. Still amusing.
oooh! it's the Devon. I love Kill James Bond
2026-03-11 01:45:38
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47641850
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Relaxation of the Fables -- REM
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2026-03-11 01:44:56
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47641901
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in reply to cwgrody
If you thought Fox Nation commercials are nonstop on FS1, you should try watching Tubi. Good lord!
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I'm surprised the cast of The Faithful: Women of the Bible aren't all dressed as handmaids.
2026-03-11 01:44:45
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47641921
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europesays.com/2837214/ Trump Says It’s “Too Soon” to Talk About Seizing Iran’s Oil #CrudeOil #CrudeOilPrice #IranWar #oil #OilExports #OilPrice #Petroleum #StraitOfHormuz #Tump #Venezuela
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europesays.com/2837214/ Trump Says It’s “Too Soon” to Talk About Seizing Iran’s Oil #CrudeOil #CrudeOilPrice #IranWar #oil #OilExports #OilPrice #Petroleum #StraitOfHormuz #Tump #Venezuela
Trump Says It’s “Too Soon” to Talk About Seizing Iran’s Oil - EUROPE SAYS
Earlier this year, U.S. forces snatched Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro from Caracas, and the Trump administration stepped in to take over the country’s oilEUROPE SAYS
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2026-03-11 02:00:17
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47641927
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My Nap Buddy and Me
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2026-03-11 01:43:52
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47641931
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📰 Shahed drone factory recruits teenagers in Russia – CCD
🔗 ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/40998…
#News #RussianInvasion #RussianWar #Ukraine
Shahed drone factory recruits teenagers in Russia – CCD
In the Russian Federation, a propaganda campaign has been launched aimed at attracting teenagers to the production of Shahed attack drones. — Ukrinform.Ukrinform (Укрінформ)
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2026-03-11 01:42:48
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47641936
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Nappy Birthday
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2026-03-11 01:42:37
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47641942
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Snoozing's My Religion
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2026-03-11 01:42:30
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47641939
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europesays.com/2837216/ For 4.79 Million Households, Oil Prices Going Up Means an Even Higher Heating Bill Than Usual This Month #CrudeOil #CrudeOilPrice #GasPrices #HeatingOil #OilPrice #OilPrices #Petroleum #PresidentDonaldTrump
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europesays.com/2837216/ For 4.79 Million Households, Oil Prices Going Up Means an Even Higher Heating Bill Than Usual This Month #CrudeOil #CrudeOilPrice #GasPrices #HeatingOil #OilPrice #OilPrices #Petroleum #PresidentDonaldTrump
For 4.79 Million Households, Oil Prices Going Up Means an Even Higher Heating Bill Than Usual This Month - EUROPE SAYS
While it has fallen out of favor in recent years, heating oil is still used to heat homes and commercial buildings across the country.EUROPE SAYS
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2026-03-11 01:43:20
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47641957
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in reply to The Gaffer
To sleep, or not to sleep, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to stay awake
Or to take to bed against a sea of troubles
And by napping, simply delay the inevitable…”
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@The Gaffer
People, we have a winner!
People, we have a winner!
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2026-03-11 03:05:02
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47641867
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Oh Snoozy Q baby I love you
Snoozy Q
#CCR
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2026-03-11 01:51:57
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47642634
Jeepers
Creepers
How 'bout you close them peepers
Jeepers
Creepers
How 'bout you close them eyes
like this
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47608556
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Y'all, I've been such a whiny knob! Here I am, in one of the most beautiful places in the world, with a lovely cabin on a mountain, within spitting distance of a vast National Park and two rivers, nice people, enough to eat, and was adopted by an amazing cat at Thanksgiving.
Yet, I've complained about this and that. Mostly the weather, but also what I saw as a lack of opportunities to take pictures. And other stuff. Pffft. Mine was a mild Winter compared to many, many here, and y'all seemed to take it in stride and with good humour.
Got out of the cabin today, and saw some naturey stuff—Spring in bloom— and had a good cry. Revived. Thankful. ❤️
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Hey, there was a lot to be whiny about this winter! But we made it through a rough one and now it's time to reap the rewards! Great photo of the turbulence you and many of us experienced. Looking forward to your Hope Springs Eternal collection. Keep on keeping on, Eddie!
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Not what I intended with the picture, but, yes.
Seeing flowering trees and a posse of elk munching on new green grass (no pictures) snapped me out of a months-long funk.
@Eric
Great! More photos please!
Thx, Will. I was inspired today. 😀
yes 😋 it's been a rough winter
You were not a whiner! You inspire me!
Kind of you, Melissa. My standard, I was whining. 🥰
BLOODY LOVE YOU EDDIE ❤️
Give yourself some grace, Eddie! We all go through it. You are so loved, my friend, and never alone! 🫂 💜
Thank you, sweet Lorraine. 🥰
Beautiful picture. The mountains are my happy place as well. And every once in a while we all need a good cry. 💜 🫂
You feeling a bit better, Teresa?
Still tired. May have pushed myself too hard to get back out on the road. Just finished some soup and will ty to eat a bit more as the day goes on. Thanks. ❤️
Rest is good. 😀
It is. I need to slow down sometimes.
Wishing you happy spring. 🌷
Thank you, brother. Back atcha. x
complained? Really?
I mean, the weather's been bloody awful for you and the conditions have made moving around really awkward and your neighbours have been amazing and Charlene loves ya.
I don't think you complained, but if you did then carry on complaining!
Great toot, man.
Hugz ... Hugz
Hugz & xXx
And thank you for the Alt Text. I opened the image presuming it was a frenetic oil painting inspired by the weather on mountains.
Delighted to know it's a timelapse instead.
Odd how reading your post coloured my immediate impression of the art medium...
Delighted to know it's a timelapse instead.
Odd how reading your post coloured my immediate impression of the art medium...
Jasmine, I'm delighted you like the picture, and I'm a big advocate of alt texts. 😀
Wow! I love it!
I haven't thought you were complaining. Getting outside on a beautiful day is my favorite way to recharge. Great picture
great picture! I'm glad, you feel better and can enjoy the spring! ❤️🫂
2026-03-11 01:37:41
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47641293
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Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers
#NapSongsOrPoems
#hashtaggames
#noeffort
youtube.com/watch?v=Y83-DaMEFu…
Genesis – Unquiet Slumbers For The Sleepers/In That Quiet Earth/Afterglow - Wind & Wuthering Vinyl
The classic closing medley from the 1976 progressive rock album Wind & Wuthering by Genesis on vinyl.0:00 "Unquiet Slumbers For The Sleepers"2:25 "In That Qu...James Kovacic (YouTube)
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2026-03-11 01:40:05
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47641314
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The play's the thing
wherein I'll catch
the unconscious of the king
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2026-03-11 01:38:45
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47570451
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I'm guessing you'd like more dahlias in your timeline.
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2026-03-11 01:39:49
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47641324
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Thy pillow is here indeed—a lovely one—
But thou quiet fled, plushy gone down the noisy road,
That leads to Stress´ most obscure abode.
Alarm clock sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.
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2026-03-11 01:36:26
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47641339
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Napper's Delight
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2026-03-11 01:36:09
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47641343
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Rejected Edmond Walmart Neighborhood Market wins second court battle
nondoc.com/2026/03/10/rejected…
Rejected Edmond Walmart Neighborhood Market wins second court battle
Judge Anthony Bonner sustained the developer's right to construct an Edmond Walmart at Covell and Coltrane Wednesday, March 4, 2026.Faithanna Olsson (NonDoc)
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2026-03-11 01:35:49
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47641357
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Golden Slumbers
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2026-03-11 01:35:35
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47641396
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#Capybara #Capibara #Carpincho 613
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#Capybara #Capibara #Carpincho 613
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2026-03-11 02:29:22
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47639800
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Love Is Like A Heat Wave because it was written by Lamont Dozier.
Anything written by Lamont Dozier.
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2026-03-11 01:34:28
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47641403
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europesays.com/2837197/ Uber launches women-only ride option in U.S. Could Canada be next? #Canada
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europesays.com/2837197/ Uber launches women-only ride option in U.S. Could Canada be next? #Canada
Uber launches women-only ride option in U.S. Could Canada be next? - EUROPE SAYS
A new Uber feature that pairs women riders with women drivers is gaining traction south of the border and raising questions about whether Canada could be next.EUROPE SAYS
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2026-03-11 02:34:58
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47640351
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The poem made into a song for a #NoEffort Twofer:
Winken Blinken and Nod
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2026-03-11 06:48:19
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47608085
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in reply to Eugen Rochko
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑
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I could not agree more
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Possible political incorrectness ahead
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@Gargron
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in reply to Ben Royce 🇺🇦 🇸🇩
@benroyce back in the day I had a bootleg DVD of The Two Towers with the best subtitles China could do.
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in reply to Wulfy—Speaker to the machines
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Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.
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thank you. When writing the German subtitles for No Other Land I had to basically do it all by hand because the context window was so narrow it got everything wrong that could be lost in translation.
machine learning can utilize all written text to help understand language and make translations better?? So basically my plagiarism machine is justified. Got em.
@ErikUden I work for Swiss Broadcast Company. Our devs did a wonderfull job in this regard. I get autotranslated subtitles that are amazingly good. It ain't literature but very good. It's a two tier system that joins the captions, then translation and then reconstructing the captions. Translation is done by Claude. Langs are not that big of a challange (DE FR IT EN). Only Rumantsch is a challange. Claude 3.5(!) Is pretty darn good though. Claude 4+ not so much
I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
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Back in my pretentious high schooler days I read Dante's Comedy and, don't know where from, the version I found was one that was like... fully translated as poetry, like in the Italian* original, going as far as trying to replicate the rhyme structure
No computer's ever going to pull off anything even remotely that mad
I'm willing to guess that machine translation of prose may serve two uses: firstly, as an assist for human translators (by preparing a very rough first cut, which they then have to refine), and secondly, as an assist for human editors in figuring out which foreign-language-works to pay a human translator (with or without AI assistance) to work on (translation costs money: knowing where to spend it is important). But those are assistive roles, not human-replacing ones.
@cstross I have a friend who worked for years as a translator (English to French) but in recent years he found that he was no longer being asked to translate but to "post-edit" machine translations. It was taking him just as long, paying him less, and destroying his soul.
He now works as a tour guide.
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@cstross
Machine translations are more of a hindrance than a help, for translators. If you don't know both languages well, having an automated dictionary lookup could possibly be useful - but if you're a translator, and especially a translator of fiction, having a nuanceless draft will only take more time to figure out. And it will be irritating time, because reading mistranslations is a pain. Editing one's own drafts is hard enough!
As to B: Editors rely on readers, reviews /...
@cstross
and the sort of awards that give a book the sheen of "worth reading".
My cred: I've translated more books than I can carry. Both fiction and technical.
My current position is that use of AI in translation is malpractice.
@Shunra @cstross
My go-to example is the Esperanto translation of Alice Through The Looking Glass published by Evertype, which has 5 different translations of "Jabberwocky", each of which is absolutely "correct" and each of which is totally different from each other. Even the names of the poem differ.
In each case one can see the decisions the translator made balancing meter, rhyme, meaning, implications & nuance of the text, based on what it meant to them; how can a computer do that?
My go-to example is the Esperanto translation of Alice Through The Looking Glass published by Evertype, which has 5 different translations of "Jabberwocky", each of which is absolutely "correct" and each of which is totally different from each other. Even the names of the poem differ.
In each case one can see the decisions the translator made balancing meter, rhyme, meaning, implications & nuance of the text, based on what it meant to them; how can a computer do that?
@HighlandLawyer @Shunra @cstross i’ve always found the wealth of translations of ‘the little prince’ to be fascinating, and the way folks can trace back certain choices, showing that x translation was actually based off of y translation instead of the original french, &c.
@cstross The first causes far more trouble than it saves. Easier just to do the work yourself. The second is true. Source: dad, who translated most King, Grafton, and Ludlum to Finnish.
- I think the most recent translated book series I read was Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy,* translated into English by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen. I don't know a word of Chinese, but I can't imagine machine translation doing these great works any justice.
* Later adapted into the Netflix series 3 Body Problem
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As someone who translates into English, I appreciate you saying this.
It's true there's a lot of very good literature in English, but I'm pretty convinced that the majority of anglophones don't know what they're missing by not reading translated books.
plus doesn't everyone do the test of translate then translate back? They are garbage in a way that even a machine could recognize as garbage.
I've just bought an English translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. I wondered which was the best translation, and found a website with multiple translations of the opening page. It was really interesting how different they were. The one by Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor was the clear winner for me.
Many times when I land on an auto-translated site I have to change the language to english because I don't even understand what's supposed to mean.
Native speaker: I think you’re right. Though I have seen warnings recently about “new translation” editions on Amazon that are just LLM trash.
@Gargron @mastodon.social I absolutely agree.
On the other hand, although I'm a native spanish speaker, I've read a couple of books in english.
I think that US pleople don't even consider reading in any language but english.
On the other hand, although I'm a native spanish speaker, I've read a couple of books in english.
I think that US pleople don't even consider reading in any language but english.
💯 languages are usually not 1:1, and translation is impossible to automate without butchering the original meaning.
bad translation really sticks out when you understand both languages. even if it's serviceable enough to get the core meaning across, it might fail to capture the tone, the cultural references, and the full weight.
i have a lot of respect for people who create good subtitles that try to preserve the original intent, even when it sometimes feels impossible.
Yes. My wife for years shunned Pratchett completely because she read a Dutch translation in the 90s.
I am an anglophone, but read in French from time to time. I tend to have a machine translator nearby to augment my poor vocabulary. Last book I read it told me nineteenth century Breton people had horses hoofs on their feet. The actual translation should have been clogs.
This stuff is constant, that's just one I remember
In addition a lot of anglophone people speak only one language, so they've never been able to compare the translation of a book between two languages they speak.
And it's not just expressions and turns of phrase, which are unique not only to each language but easily to each region.
It's words. There is often no exact match. Many words in one language are not a precise correspondence to those in another.
So an elegant turn of phrase in one becomes a wordy explanation in the other. Or a misinterpretation.
Only someone fluent in both languages can convey the true meaning accurately and eloquently.
Crunchyroll also experiments with machine translated subtitles for Japanese anime, and the community (anglophone or not) is not happy with it.
I've read translations of Haruki Murakami's novels in English and my native Danish - and I've found the latter *far* better. I can't judge the fidelity to the originals because I don't speak Japanese, but at least my reading experience with the Danish translations were a lot better - and I've probably read at least ten times as much English in my life as Danish.
I learned a while ago that the Danish translator of most (possibly all) Murakami's books has lived in Japan, knows Murakami personally, and talks to him about her translation work. And, well, the level of care put into those translations really shows.
I think anglophones experience start difference between good and bad translations more often through video games
to make matters worde, at least in the UK when you buy a DVD it only comes with English audio, English audio with descriptions, and maybe original audio, and just English subtitles, and English for the hard of hearing. That’s it. But in Spain, the same DVD, locked to the same region, carried the original audio, audio described English audio, Spanish dubbing, German dubbing, Italian dubbing… and all those languages in subtitles, plus some more.
So it is really difficult for them to be exposed to non-English content,
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Douglas Hofstadter's 2018 assessment of the state of machine translation holds up remarkably well (he agreed with you):
web.archive.org/web/2018013022…
The Shallowness of Google Translate
The program uses state-of-the-art AI techniques, but simple tests show that it's a long way from real understanding.The Atlantic
Yes, the German version of Lord of the Rings has different translators. When I tried reading it as a kid, I felt so lost. It was boring as hell.
Decades later I heard that the first translation is considered a bad one.
From what I've observed, people who claim that LLMs can replace artists don't understand art, people who claim that they can replace musicians don't understand music, people who claim that they can replace writers don't understand literature, and people who claim they can replace translators don't rely on translations. If I had a button that would erase LLMs from the world but it would take machine translations away (which is a false dichotomy anyway), I would absolutely still press it.
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Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.
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while all your examples are 100% valid, I seriously question whether we would be able to manage to do that today. With the utter shambles most democracies are in currently, multi-national Corporations can run roughshod on environmental protection, worker safety, child protection and just about everything that past generations fought hard for.
would you know if you've seen a good outcome of an LLM? You'd somehow be able to identify when the LLM got it right?
I assure you you've experienced good LLM output and don't even know it. Because that's what good LLM output looks like. Indistinguishable from human output.
Your examples are perhaps false equivalencies. Take asbestos. We didn't abolish insulation. We developed better, safer insulation. We didn't stop dying food colors, we just developed safer dyes etc.
It is a technology that humanity has been seeking for a long time. At least since the 1950s, with Turing and his colleagues.
@df No, this is marketing. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic &co want you to believe that what they're doing is artificial intelligence. My professional opinion is that LLMs are a dead end technology to creating actual intelligence. And if any of those companies did create actual intelligence for the purposes they pursue, it would be slavery, for which I cannot advocate.
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they'll never create intelligence because intelligence requires will and they do not understand will. they dont even posses one of their own: their own behaviour is driven by feelings and shaped by a commercial playbook. there is zero chance they will ever create intelligence.
@df Turing did not dream of spending the entire energy budget of the world at the time so people could generate letters from a few bullet points and the recipients could summarise them to different bullet points.
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Machine vs. Human translation of fiction is an excellent analogy. Good translation involves an understanding of complicated material in an intuitive and nuanced way, and conveying those subtleties cleverly using equally complex forms in the target language while retaining the beauty of the writing. It involves much higher level thought than what LLMs do.
Likewise software engineering is much more complex and involves higher level thinking than prompted LLM code generation.
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You sound like me arguing against the inevitability of mass use of the cell phone.
I never understood why we gave up crystal clear audio, a two way simultaneous connection (yes, both parties could talk at the same time and hear wha5 the other had to say), and phone books for unintelligible garbled speak, dropped calls, delays, and no way to look up the damn phone number.
we also had Concorde but it wasn’t economically viable. I mention that because I find that economic arguments seem to be heard more readily than moral arguments. (I often find that moral arguments induce temporary deafness in pro-AI people.)
if asbestos was invented last year it would be inevitable, I'm afraid.
When almost all legislative power has been captured by corporatism there's not much hope we could outlaw such poisons.
It's hard to put the brakes on advances, like the Ghost Shirt Society finds out at the end of Vonnegut's Player Piano.
I heard an interview with a professor yesterday who wrote a book on the benefits of keeping cash alive and not relying completely on digital payment systems. He suggested using cash at least once a week. Maybe people will be able to do that with AI - limit their use and rely on their own brains at least some of the time. blogs.bu.edu/zagorsky/
Prof. Jay Zagorsky | Economist Advocating for Using Cash
News Release “The Power of Cash”Jay Zagorsky (Prof. Jay Zagorsky)
I could not agree more
where is the perceptron
The problem is that the pieces of shit peddling LLMs have convinced the political class that it's a race to technological supremacy and that any nation that bans them will be left behind. When in reality they're more like opium.
to be fair, those in power would like to normalize lead and asbestos and so forth, because capitalism never likes to lose a business model
Just before LLMs burst onto the scene, not long after my Creative Writing MA, a friend's partner told me about them and how they could, "write a novel as well a human." I think he expected me to be shocked or horrified by this, but as a student of literature and writing, I was far more astonished that apparently someone had come up with a way to determine the final analysis of a text! A Computer Science analogy might be someone telling you they'd found a solution to the Halting Problem
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My experience has been that LLM translations are almost good enough to verify that a message is a scam.
- Re music, when I asked my spouse today what he'd add to my list of "things humans can do that AI bots can't" (me.dm/@funcrunch/1162068858850…), he said live audio mixing. (He's a professional audio engineer.)
ETA: I gave the same response as to when he proposed "Empathy": AI bots *pretend* they can do this, and are convincing at it. That's the problem.
A very incomplete list of things an ordinary #human can do for or with you that an #AI bot can't:- Give you a hug
- Give you a kiss
- Snuggle with you
- Hold your hand
- Give you a literal shoulder to cry on
- Do your hair
- Do your housework
- Cook you a meal
- Walk your dog
- Play a physical sport or game with youFeel free to add to this list
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"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." youtube.com/watch?v=Wy4EfdnMZ5…
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - I'm Sorry, Dave Scene (3/6) | Movieclips
2001: A Space Odyssey - I'm Sorry, Dave: The Hal 9000 computer refuses to obey an order from Bowman (Keir Dullea) by simply responding in monotone, "I'm sorr...Movieclips (YouTube)
yes some people have stunted systems of ethics and values, what about it.
exactly. To me, all forms of art are still about the human connection-- "Art is a tryst, for in it maker and beholder meet." The artist is communicating something that the beholder receives. With computer-generated art, the sentience on the other end is simply not there, and any "connection" is just an illusion.
And on the other hand, Maths people have always been saying stay the hell away from it! 😂
dotnet.social/@SmartmanApps/11…
1/x
#MathsMonday #Maths #Math
Over time I've saved many screenshots of #AI #slop #aiSlop stuffing up #Mathematics big time, and on occasion I've had cause to reshare them, and at times I have cursed that I can only attach 4 pics per post. Then I realised, what am I worried about - just post them all in a thread and then I can just link to the thread (or individual screenshots), and can add to it as more come up 🙂 P.S. feel free to reply with moreI hereby present to you, AI's greatest 5hits...
perhaps, but my friend who is a translator (translates from Spanish to her native French in Mexico) can't find any translation jobs any more, other than cleaning up LLM translations.
As someone said, the market can be irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
When they say LLMs can replace artists what they mean is, "We have enough art now. The sum total of art we have is sufficient. Remixing and blending the corpus of art will be good enough forever. If not we can just tap some humans afflicted with the artist disease to generate some more, and it will be cheaper! They'll do it for free! Fools."
Also the idea that gen AI will just get better and it's now only a question of years that "they" will be "as good or better than a human expert" is so naive and misses out a very important detail.
Today's gen AI/LLMs already has all the training data from humanity even that data that they have no permission for. To make AI better you would need 3 or 4 times the amount of people on earth. There is no physical principal that dictates that AI will become "better over time".
i haven't actually used French in almost 30 years, but still get annoyed watching movies where the subtitles are wrong. I have been known to pause, check a translation, curse at whoever did the captions for missing subtleties (in their subtitles), and the hit play again!
I've translated two commercial games in my native language (French), and I've grown to appreciate games that have French translations made by actual humans (especially those with dialogues), because there's always a bunch of stuff that any machine translation algorithm is never going to pick up and, when done right, really makes it worth playing
Translation is a fine art, as word-for-word will get you a ROUGH idea (usually!) but once you get into idioms, or figures of speech, everything changes entirely, often making no sense at all.
Even outside of that, different languages or dialects have different words (or lack thereof!) "Buzzard" in Europe is a broad-winged soaring raptor; in the USA, it's slang for a vulture.
I'm on the spectrum and it took me a very long time to learn puns, figures of speech, and such. I've also watched people get confused by turns of phrase when they're ESL, or even from a different region.
It's not as common now, but I used to see artists who were non-English speakers have a warning "Do not write your letter and then push it through Google Translate to send to me in my native language. It's terrible."
Anyone who thinks AI can do translation is a liar or a fool.
True story: I wanted to read the novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo some years back, so I went to the bookstore and they had two translations. The first had a serious-looking cover and the other had a trashy-looking one, so naturally I bought the former. Started to read it. It was garbage! So I went back and exchanged for the trashy-looking book. A wonderful translation!
Moral of the story: you can't judge a book by its cover.
Also, translation is art.
Speaking as a human translator, I have to admit that machine translation has gotten a lot better over the past few years. I’ve been shocked at how good it is sometimes. But it’s still wrong often enough to be a problem. I make mistakes too, but I generally know when I’m having trouble understanding something and can flag it so someone else can check it. MT never knows whether it’s wrong (it never knows anything), and it sprays out plausible-seeming text that camouflages the problem. And of course, I’m just talking about the level of a factually correct translation, not even matters of style, etc.
It's not so much that translated literature doesn't exist, it's that *publishers* think anglophone readers are scared of translated literature (I'm a professional translator, at the London Book Fair this week, and this subject has come up several times).
But yes, machine translation is bloody awful, and it's terrible to work with as a human translator too - it doesn't "make our lives easier", you have to throw it all out and start again from scratch. Except obviously you're only being pad a fraction of your normal translation rate because "it's easier".
It is not easier. It's never possible to merely edit a machine translated text and end up with something as good as a competent human translator could have produced.
Another conversation I'm having this week is how translators can convey their value to publishers and agents, but now I'm wondering whether we shouldn't also be asking how readers can convey their desire for human translated literature, and lots more of it.
Inevitably, translated literature is opening up a new world, new experiences, new ways of thinking and seeing, to the reader. We all need more of that to fight back against the narrow-minded control freakery of the right wing.
there is a great essay on translation by Simon Leys
Sensitive content
Translations are like husbands. There are beautiful translations and there are faithful translations but the beautiful ones are not faithful and the faithful ones are not beautiful.
@Gargron
@Gargron
@aj I literally just bought a new translation of the Odyssey. My third, I think? But yeah, as an American English speaker I mostly have encountered this in other nerdy pursuits. Specifically, anime and manga. Years of online debate over translations, how and when to do cultural translation, the merits of transliteration, etc.
In English, the angel and demon of Russian literature is Constance Garnett, who translated much of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky.
Angel, cuz she was one of the earliest sources of English translation.
Demon, cuz she manages to make Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky sound like the same writer.
Nabokov's Pushkin translation is an exercise in erudition. Half of every page is his translated quatrain. The other half, sometimes even more, is his footnotes about his choices & alternates.
I would love to see an LLM try to translate the Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem
This is why I learn languages, so I can read the source materials myself. Bad translations sometimes mean they manipulated the meanings, and hidden censorships you won't be aware of if you don't have access to the source.
My son had nagged for weeks about some vintage game cartridge he'd read about. For Christmas I chanced upon the game, but the original Japanese version. Google had introduced live video translation so …
In the actual literature, pre-machine translation, it was well-established that translation amounts to authorship, with the clear example of poetry -- translating poetry into a new language is absolutely an act of authorship, not a mechanical act.
It may be somewhat less true of other kinds of works, but now we're talking about degree, not of kind.
Admittedly LLM translation is pretty handy sometimes when there's no other translation alternative, but we must be prepared for it to fail utterly at times -- like other uses of LLMs.
or Google's auto translated crab, Voice or text is atrocious
@hashraydamon I was thinking about asr too! Youtube has been using that since 2009 and it still sucks somehow!
Denkt einfach nur an Erik Simons Übersetzungen der Witcher-Reihe (und "Etwas endet, etwas beginnt"-Kurzgeschichten). Viele Wortspiele aus dem Polnischen würden 1:1 gar nicht funktionieren. Deshalb hat Erik Simon, wie ein guter Übersetzer das tut, sich eine Menge künstlerischen Freiraums erlaubt, um den Sinn und Wortwitz des Originals zu erhalten, wo immer nötig.
ironically, I feel translations have become worse with the rise of LLMs. For example, I recently saw a Microsoft KB article that had a table with Yes / No in its cells, translated to German as Ja / Nr.
totalmente de acuerdo, compañero.
I've seen way too many machine-translated instructions, and that's something you really don't want to have machine-translated, for obvious reasons.
Kille Bill -> 'Kill rekening' (Kill the invoice)
Yeah, people who don't know anything about language or translation seem to think of translation as a perfect example of a "mechanical" process that should be automate-able.
*Maybe* for some kinds of technical writing (which still has its difficulties), but good translation of literature is probably one of the hardest things to replace humans for, right alongside writing good literature in the first place.
much of my work is as a legal translator (evidence, wiretaps, court filings, etc.)
The party that relies on machine translations or worse, AI translations, is the party that will lose the case. Any translator can pick holes in an AI translation big enough to cross through with a herd of elephants. Those "translations" lack nuance.
I don't get the machine translation argument. LLMs do even that poorly, certainly noticeably worse than a purpose-trained translation model, which is I believe what at least Google Translate uses.
My pet peeve about machine translation is how someone at Google and Microsoft thought that it's a good idea to "helpfully" translate developer documentation into your system language by default. As in, you have to look for a button to read it in English. Who in their right mind could possibly want that?..
I minored in linguistics in college, and a lot of exciting work was being done at the time around developing syntax models of how languages worked (and different ways humans use syntax), in part to inform machine translation models. This was more than 25 years ago. No LLMs involved.
I have not kept up with current developments in machine translation but I strongly suspect that it's built on the foundation of those decades of work actually understanding how languages function, and what maps or doesn't map. Which is completely different than expecting generative AI to create a model.
I have not kept up with current developments in machine translation but I strongly suspect that it's built on the foundation of those decades of work actually understanding how languages function, and what maps or doesn't map. Which is completely different than expecting generative AI to create a model.
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@Gargron
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on the plus side, machine translation illuminated me as to the involvement of the presbyterian church in the famous movie "Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West"
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@benroyce back in the day I had a bootleg DVD of The Two Towers with the best subtitles China could do.
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@dudinka @Sonikku
there's a universe of this stuff out there
my favorite is from the 2008 beijing olympics, a restaurant translating its name for foreign visitors, and dutifully announcing what the translation service fed back to them
Machine translated UIs are even worse a crime. LLMs don't have the slightest idea of the context of some random button, and (looking at Microsoft's German UI translations recently) seem to choose the worst possible word to drop into that.
Yeah you most definitively have to thoroughly proof read that stuff which kinda defeats the point.
My host admin added a "translate this" for foreign language posts on this instance, and it is wonderful. Not 100% accurate, but I normally get the picture and enough people speak English that quite often I can engage in my own language and its ok. So translating on the fly, and I only mean on the fly, is good. I can't think of a single other thing that should be used for LLM or any other type of computerized program.
As a reader I do appreciate when there is more than one English translation of a foreign language text that I study. That is great and super helpful and also eliminates "standards" which can't exist from just one translator.
Translation is real hard work.
It takes some real work to get all the nuances and some of the things you write in one language can take real effort not to sound utter BS in another.
Become even harder when you want to keep this through a longer document (literature as you said but not only)
LLM is a great solution though for a person that wants to get the work done and have "a product" in a language that they don't understand 😀
I tried using Gemini to translate subtitles from Italian to French (so, two latin languages) for a TV Series, and let's say little G got lost in translation... (And after the first prompt it started to hallucinate tags, and it forgot to close other tags,.resulting in subs being shown for half of an episode on top of each others...). It's pretty bad, indeed!
and worth repeating the quality directly depends on the quality of actual human translated text corpus.
Many years ago, while on holiday in Amsterdam, I bought a Dutch translation of a book by one of my favourite authors, Terry Pratchett.
In it, there was an essay, in English, by Terry, about his struggles to find a translator for the book, which was only accomplished when he realised that it wasn't just a case of taking the text and replacing it with Dutch.
No, large sections would have to be entirely re-written by the translator, to use concepts that a Dutch audience would find familiar.
And not just in Dutch, but every language.
The example he gave was one character who was experiencing the feeling of being stuck in traffic on a busy road on a Sunday afternoon, and after miles of driving, finding that the cause of the tailback was a little old lady out for her weekly drive to church in her trusty old Morris Marina, never getting above 20 MPH becuase it felt too fast.
This is something that British people are well acquanted with, but the Dutch translator had to come up with a completely different way of explaining this, because it's not something particularly prevalant over there.
It's not just about translating the words, its translating the feelings, the emotions, to something readers in another place will understand.
And LLM's fail spectacularly at that.
In it, there was an essay, in English, by Terry, about his struggles to find a translator for the book, which was only accomplished when he realised that it wasn't just a case of taking the text and replacing it with Dutch.
No, large sections would have to be entirely re-written by the translator, to use concepts that a Dutch audience would find familiar.
And not just in Dutch, but every language.
The example he gave was one character who was experiencing the feeling of being stuck in traffic on a busy road on a Sunday afternoon, and after miles of driving, finding that the cause of the tailback was a little old lady out for her weekly drive to church in her trusty old Morris Marina, never getting above 20 MPH becuase it felt too fast.
This is something that British people are well acquanted with, but the Dutch translator had to come up with a completely different way of explaining this, because it's not something particularly prevalant over there.
It's not just about translating the words, its translating the feelings, the emotions, to something readers in another place will understand.
And LLM's fail spectacularly at that.
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As an LLM would say to a translator: "All your job are belong to us".
and then there's the question on how it's used
see firefox that generated new translations and threw awai human written ones
My main use case for machine translations is spot checking words in languages I don't know as well as I should.
They are great for that.
I worked with subtitle translations for years... I need to comment on this!
The main issue people working with machine translated subtitles is that people take models for translating things in a single modal – text – and applying to a multimodal media – video. Of course the results are horrible!
There are research on improving that, sure, I did some, even, but even we are FAAAR from getting them any good. Translating "The nurse aided the doctor take care of the patient." to many languages require guessing the gender of three people! LLMs will often default to male, female and male, due to bias.
But, the sad thing we have to admit: many works of art are so unpopular the only translations people will have are machine ones, from weird anime like Sazae-san, to Mastodon toots.
For many years, YouTube has been filled with tragic machine-translated captions, even before the new AI trend of the past few years. Not only machine translated ones, but also machine generated ones converted from spoken words.
The problem with any machine translations or generated captions is that people aren't proofreading them. Viewers get garbage and the machines didn't get proper feedback.
I was read the Rig Veda, machine translated from Sanskrit to English. It was great for understanding the words that were used. And after I read a human translation I understood the text, in as far as one can understand a religious text
i do appreciate automatic subtitles extremely for hitting all my humor-chords. may they never evolve.
that being said:
i am lucky and able to read in several languages and read a lot of our bookclub books in original language. i can't count how many times i liked books that many of the others couldn't even finish their translated ones (assumedly) because the language was so poor. (and then we have those who listen to books and it totally depends on the person who was recorded.
deepl isnt that awful tbh
I think it's actually perfectly fine to just accept they fill their niche of roughly guessing what something means despite the fact modern translation models work pretty much the same as actual large language models? People trying to gotcha over this are usually not acting in good faith anyway (or dangerously reducing/simplifying things)
Heck, even machine-generated captions are often bad, without the translation. To then translate that inaccurate text is bound to result in problems.
it is weird to think the utility of machine translations is in books and film and not, say, news articles, restaurant menus, weather reports, texts to a hotel, train schedules, etc.
I do not agree, #Garbage is a good band.
This was even true in the 1600s, when the Companies of (human) Translators were translating the Bible into English (the so-called "King James" version, 1611).
Translations of human language require the ability to translate the _sense_ of some local or regional usage into something similar in the target language.
They include a footnote indicating that one passage was essentially untranslatable, because the phrase was not understood by anyone. So they used context instead.
absolutely! Translators make a big difference to the understanding of the text. And without real, poetic fluency, the meaning would be lost.
I saw a Russian film with terrible machine translated subtitles a few years ago. I still remember a scene with the dialogue, "We produce a car!" "Release the thorns!"
I suspect it was supposed to be gritty, hardened police saying something like "Target approaching", "Deploy tire spikes".
Release the thorns does not have quite the same tone.
Funnily enough, literature is an easier translation target than social media. The latter is ever evolving, the former is frozen in time.
funnily enough the transformer block used in most LLMs was invented for translation and TBH LLMs are much better at translation than anything before them. Not refuting your point but as machine translation goes LLMs are the best we have.
Also, LLMs are making machine translations worse by adding hallucinated content into the translations:
404media.co/ai-translations-ar…
AI Translations Are Adding ‘Hallucinations’ to Wikipedia Articles
Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article.The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of generative AI across the internet from diminishing the reliability of the world’s largest repository of knowledge. The incident also reveals how even well-intentioned efforts to expand Wikipedia are prone to errors when they rely on generative AI, and how they’re remedied by Wikipedia’s open governance model.
The issue in this case starts with an organization called the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving Wikipedia and other open platforms.
“We do so by providing monthly stipends to full-time contributors and translators,” OKA’s site says. “We leverage AI (Large Language Models) to automate most of the work.”
The problem is that editors started to notice that some of these translations introduced errors to articles. For example, a draft translation for a Wikipedia article about the French royal La Bourdonnaye family cites a book and specific page number when discussing the origin of the family. A Wikipedia editor, Ilyas Lebleu, who goes by Chaotic Enby on Wikipedia, checked that source and found that the specific page of that book “doesn't talk about the La Bourdonnaye family at all.”
“To measure the rate of error, I actually decided to do a spot-check, during the discussion, of the first few translations that were listed, and already spotted a few errors there, so it isn't just a matter of cherry-picked cases,” Lebleu told me. “Some of the articles had swapped sources or added unsourced sentences with no explanation, while 1879 French Senate election added paragraphs sourced from material completely unrelated to what was written!”
As Wikipedia editors looked at more OKA-translated articles, they found more issues.
“Many of the results are very problematic, with a large number of [...] editors who clearly have very poor English, don't read through their work (or are incapable of seeing problems) and don't add links and so on,” a Wikipedia page discussing the OKA translation said. The same Wikipedia page also notes that in some cases the copy/paste nature of OKA translators’ work breaks the formatting on some articles.
Wikipedia editors investigated how OKA was operating and found that it was mostly relying on cheap labor from contractors in the Global South, and that these contractors were instructed to copy/paste articles to popular LLMs to produce translations.
For example, a public spreadsheet used by OKA translators to keep track of what articles they’re translating instructs them to “pick an article, copy the lead section into Gemini or chatGPT, then review if some of the suggestions are an improvement to readability. Make edits to the Wiki articles only if the suggestions are an improvement and don't change the meaning of the lead. Do not change the content unless you have checked that what Gemini says is correct!”
Lebleu told me, and other editors have noted in their public on-site discussion of the issue, that these same instructions previously told OKA translators to use Grok, Elon Musk’s LLM, for the same purpose. Grok, which also produces an entirely automated alternative to Wikipedia called Grokepedia, is prone to errors precisely because it does not use humans to vet its output.
“The use of Grok proved controversial, notably given the reasons for which Grok has been in the news recently, and a recent in-house study showed ChatGPT and Claude perform more accurately, leading them to switch a few days ago, although they still recommend Grok as ‘valuable for experienced editors handling complex, template-heavy articles,’” Lebleu told me.
Ultimately the editors decided to implement restrictions against OKA translators who make multiple errors, but not block OKA translation as a rule.
“OKA translators who have received, within six months, four (correctly applied) warnings about content that fails verification will be blocked without further warning if another example is found,” the Wikipedia editors wrote. “Content added by an OKA translator who is subsequently blocked for failing verification may be presumptively deleted [...] unless an editor in good standing is willing to take responsibility for it.”
A job posting for a “Wikipedia Translator” from OKA offers $397 a month for working up to 40 hours per week. The job listing says translators are expected to publish “5-20 articles per week (depending on size).”
“They leverage machine translation to accelerate the process. We have published over 1500 articles and the number grows every day,” the job posting says.
“Given this precarious status, I am worried that more uncertainty in the translator duties may lead to an overloading of responsibilities, which is worrying as independent contractors do not necessarily have the same protections as paid employees,” Lebleu wrote in the public Wikipedia discussion about OKA.
Jonathan Zimmermann, the founder and president of OKA, and who goes by 7804j
on Wikipedia, told me that translators are paid hourly, not per article, and that there is no fixed article quota.
“We emphasize quality over speed,” Zimmerman told me in an email. “In fact, some of the problematic cases involved unusually high output relative to time spent — which in retrospect was a warning sign. Those cases were driven by individual enthusiasm and speed rather than institutional pressure.”
Zimmerman told me that “errors absolutely do occur,” but that OKA’s process includes human review, requires translators to check their content against cited sources, and that “senior editors periodically review samples, especially from newer translators.”
“Following the recent discussion, we have strengthened our safeguards,” Zimmerman told me. “We are now rolling out a second, independent LLM review step. Translators must run the completed draft through a separate model using a dedicated comparison prompt designed to identify potential discrepancies, omissions, or inaccuracies relative to the source text. Initial findings suggest this is highly effective at detecting potential issues.”
Zimmerman added that if this method proves insufficient, OKA is considering introducing formal peer review mechanisms
Using AI to check the output of AI for errors is a method that is historically prone to errors. For example, we recently reported on an AI-powered private school that used AI to check AI-generated questions for students. Internal testing found it had at least a 10 percent failure rate.
“I agree that using AI to check AI can absolutely fail — and in some contexts it can fail at very high rates. We’re not assuming the secondary model is reliable in isolation,” Zimmerman said. “The key point is that we’re not replacing human verification with automated verification. The second model is a complement to manual review, not a substitute for it.”
“When a coordinated project uses AI tools and operates at scale, it’s going to attract attention. I understand why editors would examine that closely. Ultimately, the outcome of the discussion formalized expectations that are largely aligned with our existing internal policies,” Zimmerman added. “However, these restrictions apply specifically to OKA translators. I would prefer that standards apply equally to everyone, but I also recognize that organized, funded efforts are often held to a higher bar.”
Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human
Grokipedia is not a 'Wikipedia competitor.' It is a fully robotic regurgitation machine designed to protect the ego of the world’s wealthiest man.Jason Koebler (404 Media)
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I've read machine translated versions of Beowulf, which I've read in various translations dozens of times. It's my favorite story of all time. And Old English, like Old Norse is a very descriptive language with hidden meaning behind it. And these machines loose those linquistic nuances. You can tell when a medieval text is machine translated...because they're not all that exciting. And Beowulf is exciting!
This entry was edited (5 hours ago)
Look into Aymara and machine translation.
Its an amazing rabbit hole.
Some titles are perfectly constructed pearls of wisdom and insight. LLMs wouldn't have a clue.
Lem would confuse the heck out of an LLM. Heck, I think his work confused most of his translators too!
This is why I mentioned Lem
There was a masterful translator, In one of the "Constructor Trurl and Klapautius" stories, one of them makes a machine that makes items that start with a letter "n", the list and the consequences (spoilers) are a masterful translation.
english.lem.pl/works/novels/th…
Stanisław Lem - How The World Was Saved
The Official Site of Stanislaw Lem: biography, reviews, drawings, a gallery of covers and illustrations, essays, short stories, bibliography.english.lem.pl
all your base are belong to us, man...
Hello
How are you?
How are you?
Has everyone already heard of the brilliant machine translation for the saying "Out of sight, out of mind"?
"Invisible, idiot."
I had what I thought was a really great concept for a book or game, but I'm not a talented artist.
I think it was 21 or 22 I started using AI to try and make the images I could see in my head.
Must have run over 1000 iterations with various prompts, negative prompts, and many hours of research. I got exactly zero usable artwork.
It was equally unhelpful with descriptive filler text even when presented info on a silver platter. AI = Garbage Out.
This entry was edited (2 hours ago)
I'm pretty sure J.R.R. Tolkien would view LLM's as an abomination
circa 2000 I came to the conclusion to consider translated textbooks only when the translators name was mentioned on the title.
This came after the worst translation ever, that translated SQL commands in sample code
And back then it was all human, went downhill recently (though machines are useful for small snippets)
Never regretted this decision.
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europesays.com/2837198/ Trump news at a glance: war on Iran is either ‘very complete’ or just starting, depending on who is talking | Trump administration #TheWhiteHouse #TrumpAdministration
Trump news at a glance: war on Iran is either ‘very complete’ or just starting, depending on who is talking | Trump administration - EUROPE SAYS
How much longer will US strikes on Iran continue? Getting a clear answer from the Trump administration has been difficult – getting a consistent one, evenEUROPE SAYS
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