[HN Gopher] What Google Translate Can Tell Us About Vibecoding
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What Google Translate Can Tell Us About Vibecoding
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-06-17 19:23 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ingrids.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (ingrids.space)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| In my limited experience, LLMs can have issues with translation
| tone -- but these issues are pretty easily fixed with good
| prompting.
|
| I want to believe there will be even more translators in the
| future. I really want to believe it.
| darvinyraghpath wrote:
| Fascinating thought piece. While I agree with the thrust of the
| piece: 'that llms can't _really_ replace engineers ',
| unfortunately the way the industry works is that the excuse of
| AI, however grounded in reality has been repurposed as a cudgel
| against actual software industry workers. Sure eventually
| everyone might figure out that AI can't really write code by
| itself - and software quality will degrade.. But unfortunately
| we've long been on the path of enshitification and I fear the
| trend will only continue. If google's war against its own
| engineers has resulted in shittier software - and things start
| break twice a year instead of once - would anyone really blink
| twice?
| tartoran wrote:
| Maybe AI can't replace engineers but it surely can apply
| downward pressure on engineers' salaries.
| krackers wrote:
| This seems like a terrible comparison since Google Translate is
| completely beat by DeepL, let alone LLMs. (Google Translate
| almost surely doesn't use an LLM, or at least not a _large_ one
| given its speed)
| Ninjinka wrote:
| For Google's Cloud Translation API you can choose between the
| standard Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model or the
| "Translation LLM (Google's newest highest quality LLM-style
| translation model)".
|
| https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/advanced/translating...
|
| DeepL also has a translation LLM, which they claim is 1.4-1.7x
| better than their classic model:
| https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/next-gen-language-model
| tkgally wrote:
| > ... a translators' and interpreters' work is mostly about
| ensuring context, navigating ambiguity, and handling cultural
| sensitivity. This is what Google Translate cannot currently do.
|
| Google Translate can't, but LLMs given enough context can. I've
| been testing and experimenting with LLMs extensively for
| translation between Japanese and English for more than two years,
| and, when properly prompted, they are really good. I say this as
| someone who worked for twenty years as a freelance translator of
| Japanese and who still does translation part-time.
|
| Just yesterday, as it happens, I spent the day with Claude Code
| vibe-coding a multi-LLM system for translating between Japanese
| and English. You give it a text to be translated, and it asks you
| questions that it generates on the fly about the purpose of the
| translation and how you want it translated--literal or free,
| adapted to the target-language culture or not, with or without
| footnotes, etc. It then writes a prompt based on your answers,
| sends the text to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google,
| creates a combined draft from the three translations, and then
| sends that draft back to the three models for several rounds of
| revision, checking, and polishing. I had time to run only a few
| tests on real texts before going to bed, but the results were
| really good--better than any model alone when I've tested them,
| much better than Google Translate, and as good as top-level
| professional human translation.
|
| The situation is different with interpreting, especially in
| person. If that were how I made my living, I wouldn't be too
| worried yet. But for straight translation work where the
| translator's personality and individual identity aren't
| emphasized, it's becoming increasingly hard for humans to
| compete.
| lukax wrote:
| Try Soniox for real-time translation (interpreting). With the
| limited context it has in real-time, it's actually really good.
|
| https://soniox.com
|
| Disclaimer: I work for Soniox.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I've been looking for that! Thanks
| philsnow wrote:
| The distinction between what people typically imagine a
| translator's job is and the reality reminds me of pixar movies
| being "localized" instead of just translated (green beans on a
| plate in the Japan release instead of broccoli because that's the
| food that Japanese kids don't like).
|
| Lacking cultural context while reading translated texts is what
| made studying history finally interesting to me.
| sodality2 wrote:
| This article is spot on about a lot of things. One thing I think
| it fails to address is this:
|
| > I feel confident in asserting that people who say this would
| not have hired a translator or learned Japanese in a world
| without Google Translate; they'd have either not gone to Japan at
| all, or gone anyway and been clueless foreigners as tourists are
| wont to do.
|
| The correlation here would be something like: the people using AI
| to build apps previously would simply never have created an app,
| so it's not affecting software development as a career as much as
| you first expect.
|
| It would be like saying AI art won't affect artists, because the
| people who would put in such little effort probably would never
| have commissioned anyone. Which may be a little true (at least in
| that it reduces the impact).
|
| However, I don't necessarily know if that's true for software
| development. The ability to build software enabled huge business
| opportunities at very low costs. I think the key difference is
| this: the people who are now putting in such low effort into
| commissioning software maybe _did_ hire software engineers before
| this, and that might throw off a lot of the numbers.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Conversely, it may create jobs. Why? Because the more elephants
| you have in your parade, the more jobs there are for folks to
| walk behind them with a broom and bucket. For decades we've
| seen tools that "let users write their own software" and every
| one of them has driven up the demand for people to clean it up,
| make it scale, make it secure, or otherwise clean up the mess.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I think you could extrapolate it and say folks are primarily
| using GenAI for things they aren't considered a specialist in.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Google translate is a good example too in terms of better-than-
| nothing to the completely uninitiated, helpful to someone with
| a little knowledge, and obviously not a replacement for a
| professional. That is - the more you know, the more you see its
| failures.
|
| I know enough Japanese to talk like a small child, make halting
| small talk in a taxi, and understand a dining menu / restaurant
| signage broadly. I also have been enough times to understand
| context where literal translation to English fails to convey
| the actual message.. for example in cases where they want to
| say no to a customer but can't literally say no.
|
| I have found Google Translate to be similarly magical and dumb
| for 15 years of traveling to Japan without any huge
| improvements other than speed. The visual real-time image OCR
| stuff was an app they purchased (Magic Lens?) that I had
| previously used.
|
| So who knows, maybe LLM coding stays in a similar pretty-good-
| never-perfect state for a decade.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| As long as the person you are talking or writing to is aware that
| you're not a native speaker, they will understand that you won't
| be able to follow conventions around polite languages or
| understand subtle nuances on their part. It's really a non issue.
| The finer clues of language are intended for people who are from
| the same culture.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >All this is not to say Google Translate is doing a bad job
|
| Google Translate is doing a bad job.
|
| The Chrome translate function regularly detects Traditional
| Chinese as Japanese. While many characters are shared, detecting
| the latter is trivial by comparing unicode code points - Chinese
| has no kana. The function used to detect this correctly, but it
| has regressed.
|
| Most irritatingly of all, it doesn't even let you correct its
| mistakes: as is the rule for all kinds of modern software, the
| machine thinks it knows best.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| While it's just anecdotal evidence, I have translator friends and
| work has indeed been drying up over the past decade, and that has
| only accelerated with the introduction of LLMs. Just check any
| forum or facebook group for translators, it's all doom and gloom
| about AI. See this reddit thread, for example:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/comments/173okwg...
|
| While professionals still produce much better quality
| translations, the demand for everything but the most sensitive
| work is nearly gone. Would you recommend your offspring get into
| the industry?
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