[HN Gopher] Translating Latin demonology manuals with GPT-4 and ...
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       Translating Latin demonology manuals with GPT-4 and Claude
        
       Author : benbreen
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2023-10-03 14:13 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
        
       | kevingadd wrote:
       | "It's clear that GPT-4 and Claude are skilled translators" on
       | what basis? What makes a predictor LLM better at translating
       | Latin than a system trained specifically for translation?
       | 
       | I'm sure they can do a decent job but it's weird to me that
       | someone would leap to GPT-style tech despite its known tendency
       | to hallucinate/make stuff up instead of translation-oriented
       | tools like DeepL or Google Translate (I say this as someone who
       | despises both of those tools due to their quality issues)
       | 
       | I can't imagine there are vast swaths of Latin in GPT's training
       | set.
        
         | lukebitts wrote:
         | I haven't attempted latin translations, but anything from my
         | native language to english and back has been 100% perfect,
         | miles better than anything google translate can do
        
         | vore wrote:
         | I don't think they're arguing that an LLM is better at
         | translation that an actual translator, just that they are
         | pretty good at it. DeepL and Google Translate definitely also
         | make things up though, so I don't think that's a good
         | comparison...
        
         | benbreen wrote:
         | Well, that's just it - I use Google Translate all the time to
         | translate historical texts, and for whatever reason, GPT-4 and
         | Claude both work better. Since I deal with texts that feature
         | archaic orthography like the long s (s) the main advantage over
         | Google Translate is that LLMs can make educated guesses about
         | what a word _should_ be. But even in terms of pure translation
         | ability -- assuming all orthographic issues have been corrected
         | -- the LLMs do a better job in the languages I 've tested and
         | which I can read (early modern Portuguese, Spanish and French,
         | plus Latin).
         | 
         | The post by David Bell which I linked to gets into this for
         | French - I agree with him that ChatGPT (I guess he was using
         | GPT 3.5) has a tendency to "overtranslate." But it is super
         | impressive as a translator overall IMO:
         | https://davidabell.substack.com/p/playing-around-with-machin...
        
       | paxcoder wrote:
       | [dead]
        
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       (page generated 2023-10-03 23:00 UTC)