this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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AI Killed My Job: Translators (www.bloodinthemachine.com)
submitted 3 days ago by Davriellelouna@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] Yaky@slrpnk.net 15 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I know someone who was a translator between two (less widely spoken) languages, and some specifics I recall from our conversations about work:

  • Sometimes the translations use many technical terms, and getting those wrong (trusting LLMs) is not an option. (This was for some patents IIRC)
  • Some terms simply do not exist in another language, and it could be up to the translator to invent a term to define and carry the information across. (This was for some government digital service, and the term was similar to "digital queue")
  • Tone and nuances are very difficult to translate. Phrasing can have implications and connotations. (Simplest example: "i am afraid" does not imply fear, it's an established politeness phrase) Neutral in one language could be viewed as hostile in another, too. (And with politicians being petty, could have consequences)

None of those would be addressed with LLMs. Small training set for language (and language being similar to a few others) is an issue. Anything technical or non-existing would be prone to hallucinations. And tone is difficult enough to convey through text to begin with, let alone with LLM translation.

[–] OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

LLM gets 95% of the translation done, but the 5% is likely every important and it takes longer to confirm it's correct than to do it from scratch anyway

[–] Yaky@slrpnk.net 1 points 20 hours ago

How good is LLM training data for a language spoken by less than 10 million people? Keep in mind that most of those people are probably multilingual (i.e. categorizing which language is which by person is harder), and language itself is similar to its neighbors. And then, again, terms.

[–] RightEdofer@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

Unfortunately it doesn’t have to be better than the worker, we all know this sucks at most of the things it’s being touted as great at.

It just has to convince management who make decisions that it’ll save money (or that they can spin it that way) for the next quarter. That alone is enough to destroy people’s lives.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net -1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I wonder what % of all translations are things like patents, legal paper and movies and what are simple localizations. Even in the more complex cases you can pass the entire text through AI first and then just proof read it and correct the errors.

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 2 days ago

That proofreading is as hard as with code. Defeats the purpose.