Does it? They had people writing articles in Spanish, knowing their Spanish-speaking audience and what would appeal to them. Now it’s just English articles translated into Spanish. Badly.
What?? You mean there’s more to translating media than scraping together the literaltranslation of one language to another and calling it done??
Nah, those Spanish folks will totally get all the English idioms and phrasing they’ve likely never heard of, and will totally not be confused over the piss poor machine translation effort
To be fair, translation engines like deepl.com do handle idioms pretty well compared to google translate. It probably depends on the idiom and the languages though. But even deepl is nowhere near perfect. Fine for random stuff to be understood but not good for a professional news website.
Gizmodo is a global tech news site, not a local news site. The majority of articles on the site are not region specific.
It makes sense to save costs by translating the articles instead of writing separate articles. The local editors can improve the quality of the translated articles, adding or modifying parts to appeal Spanish-speaking audience.
English is a region-specific language as much as Spanish is. A huge amount of the globe speaks Spanish and much of it shares a culture with significant differences from the English-speaking world and thus different interests.
The local editors can improve the quality of the translated articles, adding or modifying parts to appeal Spanish-speaking audience.
That assumes those local editors will be given any time to take on that extra workload of sorting through whatever translational errors the AI has done.
Even if an AI accurately translates the article text word for wrord, literal translation does not often equal accurate translation.
Have you not been paying attention to AI over the last year? It can easily go beyond just translating word for word. This isn’t Google Translate anymore.
How sure are you that idioms which don’t even have good translations will be accurately translated by the AI? How sure are you that there won’t be cultural misunderstandings which go beyond translation?
While I’m not a native Italian speaker. This is the result of having GPT4 translate the meaning not the words themselves.
These are the results:
Prompt: “Can you translate the meaning of an idiom in English to an equal idiom in Italian?
Example 1: A hard nut to crack
Response: Certainly! The English idiom “a hard nut to crack” can be translated to the Italian idiom “un osso duro,” which also conveys the idea of something or someone being difficult to understand or solve.”
Then I did some research and that is an actual idiom and it translate to the words A Hard Bone literally, but it means a like “this is a touch cookie, a tough one” so I would say it’s the same meaning.
Yeah, I can tell you’re not an Italian speaker. That’s not the proper Italian idiom, lol.
The actual idiom is “osso duro de roer”, without the verb it is not the idiom. And no, it doesn’t mean “tough cookie” in the same way that tough cookie is used in English. Nor does it mean Hard nut to crack either. Nuance is really lost with the technocrats, eh.
What would be interesting to know is whether this would also work when translating the idiom as part of a larger text or if this only works when specifically prompted to translate a single idiom.
Does it? They had people writing articles in Spanish, knowing their Spanish-speaking audience and what would appeal to them. Now it’s just English articles translated into Spanish. Badly.
What?? You mean there’s more to translating media than scraping together the literal translation of one language to another and calling it done??
Nah, those Spanish folks will totally get all the English idioms and phrasing they’ve likely never heard of, and will totally not be confused over the piss poor machine translation effort
Especially when it’s written in SEO-English which is frequently garbage in the first place.
I didn’t even think about the idioms. Excellent point.
To be fair, translation engines like deepl.com do handle idioms pretty well compared to google translate. It probably depends on the idiom and the languages though. But even deepl is nowhere near perfect. Fine for random stuff to be understood but not good for a professional news website.
Aren’t the English articles already written by an ai anyway? Doesn’t it make sense to have a more homogeneous chain of production?
Gizmodo is a global tech news site, not a local news site. The majority of articles on the site are not region specific.
It makes sense to save costs by translating the articles instead of writing separate articles. The local editors can improve the quality of the translated articles, adding or modifying parts to appeal Spanish-speaking audience.
English is a region-specific language as much as Spanish is. A huge amount of the globe speaks Spanish and much of it shares a culture with significant differences from the English-speaking world and thus different interests.
Not to take away from your point, but even the English speaking world can have significant differences among its regions.
Ads disguised as news stories.
That assumes those local editors will be given any time to take on that extra workload of sorting through whatever translational errors the AI has done.
Even if an AI accurately translates the article text word for wrord, literal translation does not often equal accurate translation.
Have you not been paying attention to AI over the last year? It can easily go beyond just translating word for word. This isn’t Google Translate anymore.
How sure are you that idioms which don’t even have good translations will be accurately translated by the AI? How sure are you that there won’t be cultural misunderstandings which go beyond translation?
While I’m not a native Italian speaker. This is the result of having GPT4 translate the meaning not the words themselves.
These are the results:
Prompt: “Can you translate the meaning of an idiom in English to an equal idiom in Italian?
Example 1: A hard nut to crack
Response: Certainly! The English idiom “a hard nut to crack” can be translated to the Italian idiom “un osso duro,” which also conveys the idea of something or someone being difficult to understand or solve.”
Then I did some research and that is an actual idiom and it translate to the words A Hard Bone literally, but it means a like “this is a touch cookie, a tough one” so I would say it’s the same meaning.
Yeah, I can tell you’re not an Italian speaker. That’s not the proper Italian idiom, lol.
The actual idiom is “osso duro de roer”, without the verb it is not the idiom. And no, it doesn’t mean “tough cookie” in the same way that tough cookie is used in English. Nor does it mean Hard nut to crack either. Nuance is really lost with the technocrats, eh.
lol how are you gonna praise its language skills in a language YOU DONT SPEAK
What would be interesting to know is whether this would also work when translating the idiom as part of a larger text or if this only works when specifically prompted to translate a single idiom.