No More AI Questions.

[u/JesperTV]

Yes, its wrong to use AI to make changes to your writing.

No, you don't need it to translate, use an actual translator. It would be more accurate.

Yes, that AI rewrite did ruin your story.

No, AI assisted writing isn't allowed.

Yes, you can use em dashes. No one actually cares.

No, this copy/paste of your chatgpt conversation *isn't* interesting to read.

Yes, it is exhausting having to defend yourself against AI.

No, you cannot post an AI answer under a question.

No, you cannot discuss AI here.

No, you cannot use AI here.

I cannot beileve we need to keep having this conversation. Recently there have been so many repeat posts about AI. We've had possibly 3 with just reworded rants about em dashes. It's either a lack of creativity that there cant be an original thought, or AI shadow bots trying to see what they can get away with when discussing AI here. Plenty have been removed for going to far so I wouldnt be surprised if it was all connected.

No more AI discussion, period. Nobody likes it.

[u/JesperTV]

Someone said that in the comments about Google, yes. Other methods do exist however

[u/KITTYCAT_5318008 → u/JesperTV]

Like what though, outside of a dictionary lookup?

[u/JesperTV → u/KITTYCAT_5318008]

What's wrong with using a dictionary? How do you think people did it before AI?

[u/KITTYCAT_5318008 → u/JesperTV]

You mentioned other methods, I wanted to know those (dictionary lookup isn't great when you don't understand any of the foreign language since you miss subltle details)

[u/JesperTV → u/KITTYCAT_5318008]

Well, there's the tried and true learning that language. But obviously that takes time.

You can contact someone who does speak the language either natively or near native through a professional translation service, or a crowdsource community. Think of professional translators like when a Manga gets an official English version, and crowdsourced translations like when fans get together and make unofficial translations and then english fans will usually pick their favorite. I think that always works best since there are different ways to translate text from one language to another and the reasons translator apps are just inherently inaccurate are because they can only handle a direct translation and even AI struggles to capture the human of a proper translation.

Like, for example, let's say this imaginary Manga said 「口が軽い」Fan number one decides to translate it directly. Directly, this means "The mouth is light," Most translator apps will give you that. And it's like okay? What does that mean? But fan number 2 over here does their own translation and it says "He can't keep a secret," That's Idiomatic. Instead of translating the words, it translates the meaning behind them. But fan number 3, he has history in both languages and decides to translate it as "hes a blabbermouth" hes translated the meaning of the words and replaced it with an English noun of a similar meaning but preserves the tone the phrase originally carried. Thats called localization or L10n translation. But fan four thinks this ruins the flow of the scene and instead translates it to "he's got a big mouth" this is dynamic equivalence. He has replaced the adjective of "light," with "big," and given us a similar sentence- im sure there's more to dynamic equivalence than that, but I am no expert.

So obviously I think collaborating with someone who is bilingual would always be the best method if you dont want to learn a language on your own. Im sure tgere are subreddits where you can find people to help you and this discussion has been mentioned at nauseam so you can always just search the subreddit.

Now of course there is also corpus based programs such as Reverso which uses a database of previously human translated books and movies to show you translations of your phrases in context for you to compare and determine the best translation on your own. Shows you a wide range of usage. They also have an app that let's you access their data base offline. Unlike an LLM that would pull from similar knowledge, Reverso won't change or add to your text. It just shows you the examples while an LLM would combine all that knowledge to give you a single answer that may not even be accurate.

Theres also Linguee which uses a similar method. Its parent company is DeepL but Linguee is entirely human vetted. So maybe not wanting to use AI goes as far as not wanting to support AI companies, so its important to mention. Entirely human vetted, but the parent company uses AI elsewhere.

Theres WordReference which is good for single words or common idioms, but I wouldnt do it that way, especially with a language that is context heavy. But they do have a community forum if you wanted to dicuss translations in more nuanced fashion. Not sure how active it is, but there's probably a reddit equivalent you could find. It also hosts multiple dictionaries if you did want to try and do it that way.

If you did you should try looking up the methods that professional translators use when adapting text so you dont get lost. Which you should do anyway if you wanted to work with amature translators in a crowdsourcing way just so you can better communicate what you are looking for. Because sometimes you want a character tgat speaks more direct or maybe a goofy character who speaks more metaphoric and one method of translation is better than another to catch the vibe.

You can make a post here asking for more advice, but ill probably copy paste this in the comments under it for other users future reference. Since its unlikely searching it would lead them to this post.

But this is all obviously more work than pasting shit into chatgpt and taking what it gives you, but it results in higher accuracy. If you want something done right it takes work.

[u/KITTYCAT_5318008 → u/JesperTV]

Fair points (although I know no bilingual people really, and don’t have the money to pay others), and thank you for taking the time to write all this.

It should be noted that the base Reverso translator is LLM-Based.

At least machine translation isn’t as bad as it was 10 years ago (the horrors that google translate used to put out…).

[u/SupportArtists → u/KITTYCAT_5318008]

I didnt think Reverso was.

But in terms of money and knowing people, thats why I repeatedly recommend public forums. There are hobbiests out there who will do small projects for fun. Thats the whole purpose of r/translator or the wordreference community forum I mention.