Fuck AI

Translation is exactly what AI can be used for. But I don't need a machine translator telling me how to live my life and what to do.

No idea if speech translation is done differently than a stt->translation pipeline. I sometime use Mozilla's local translation built into current Firefox for text translation. It's not as good as Google or DeepL at the moment, but I find it mostly usable.

We should get to those eventually, it's just not priority #1.

Ask actual translators, humans. These translation models likely also suck in terms of getting training data WITH CONSENT.

Neural networks have been used for language translation long before LLMs came to be. Natural languages are very hard to put into any "hard" structures, after all.

The best we could do for a long time is train a neural network to do it. The interesting thing is, LLMs are quite good at translating stuff because the principle is more or less the same: find patterns in the original language, replace them with the same patterns in the target language. Just because of the sheer amount of data that goes into an LLM, it becomes good at translating stuff.

That said, it'll never be perfect. These things don't understand any meaning behind any of the words, they just look for patterns. If you are fluent in more than one language, it becomes very apparent when you try to translate things back and forth. Often it will convey the same meaning, but it'll sound a bit off. Sometimes it can completely hallucinate the context and then your translation will be way off.

If it's a professional setting where you can't afford to get things wrong, do hire a professional translator.