Tootfinder

“Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:        
And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught                        
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light”
(Edward FitzGerald and the Rubšiyšt of Omar Khayyšm, 1st edition 1859)
#Poetry #Translation

Human translators manage good #translation because they comprehend the original text, know its intricacies and can actually creatively write to preserve its gist. Context is more than the surrounding paragraphs: it includes the cultural and social background, other books, etc. Sometimes it literally involves getting hints from the author. And in the end, it is deeply personal. It can't be "accurate", because no two people are the same, and no two languages map 1:1 (though the interpretation will also differ between different users of the same language); the best you can do is add translator's notes.
LLM translators manage good translation because they've been fed tons of human translation work, and quite often they manage to match an original human translation and plagiarize it. They may even seem better because they seem to manage it without sufficient context, but that's only because they've found a human translation that had that context already.
Or, well, technically they can also regurgitate something that makes sense only in the irrelevant original context.
#NoAI #NoLLM