[HN Gopher] AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations ...
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AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable
languages
Author : kawera
Score : 126 points
Date : 2025-10-25 19:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
| foxglacier wrote:
| If nobody's reading them and nobody's writing them, then perhaps
| it doesn't matter. We could let Wikipedia-Greenlandic persist as
| its own evolved language that forks from the original.
|
| > potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth
| toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away
| from them.
|
| OK? We have lots of dead languages. It's fine. People use
| whatever languages are appropriate to them and we don't need to
| maintain them forever.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| I see that this comment get downvoted but I think we can agree
| on the facts that languages, just like species, die while other
| flourish. And that's fine.
|
| Survival of the fittest, right ? Not enough people speaking
| Greenlandic, too complicated even for it's own population who
| would rather speak danish ? The very reason I'm speaking
| English is because it was forced military during the 19th
| century by the UK and since the 20th by Hollywood.
|
| Just like a virus, if a language doesn't spread, it die.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| As an immigrant to an anglophone country, I noticed a few
| things:
|
| When people have varying levels of capability with languages,
| they'll switch to whatever is the lowest common denominator
| -- the language that the group can best communicate in. This
| tended to be English, even amongst a bunch of native speakers
| of a common foreign language.
|
| Moreover, this is context dependent: when talking about
| technical matters (especially computing), the Lingua Franca
| (pun intended) is English. You'll hear "locals" switch to
| either mixed or pure English, even if they're not great at
| it. Science, aviation, etc... is the same.
|
| Before English it was French that had this role, and before
| then it was Latin and Greek.
|
| The thing is, when the whole world speaks one common language
| like Latin or English, this is a tiny bit sad for some Gaelic
| tribe that got wiped out culturally, but incredibly valuable
| for everybody everywhere. International commerce becomes
| practical. Students can study overseas, spreading ideas
| further and wider. Books have a bigger market, attracting
| smarter and better authors. There's a bigger pool of talented
| authors to begin with, some of which write educational
| textbooks of exceptional sparkling quality. These all
| compound to create a more educated, vibrant, and varied
| culture... because of, not despite the single language.
| overfeed wrote:
| > The thing is, when the whole world speaks one common
| language like Latin or English, this is a tiny bit sad for
| some Gaelic tribe that got wiped out culturally, but
| incredibly valuable for everybody everywhere.
|
| I find this cultural Darwinism argument incredibly ironic,
| given how vocal factions in 2 of largest (native) English-
| speaking countries have been whinging about "their culture"
| being sullied by immigrants.
| don-bright wrote:
| We already see the 'best' LLMs switch between different
| languages while they are 'thinking'. It seems to me that the
| more languages it can 'think' in, the better off it will be.
| Different human languages have different concepts of time,
| numbers, nature, place, intention, relationships, and so
| forth and so on.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Survival of the fittest on a long time horizon means the
| more diversity the better the survival rate will be.
|
| This is just a misapplication of the analogy. For a
| language, "fitness" refers to similarity to whatever
| language is spoken by people relevant to you. Diversity is
| the worst quality a language can exhibit, and is the
| quality that causes dying languages to die.
|
| There is no such concept as an external force coming in
| that certain languages handle better, allowing them to
| temporarily outcompete other languages. Existing pools of
| diversity are not protective against this, because it can't
| happen.
|
| Also unlike genetic diversity, linguistic diversity does
| not need to be maintained as a legacy of the past. It is
| constantly being generated in much larger quantities than
| are desired. If you managed to perform the opposite of the
| Tower of Babel miracle and replaced every currently-spoken
| language everywhere in the world with a perfect
| monoculture, within 1-2 generations you'd be back to having
| mutually unintelligible varieties in different regions.
| arthurjj wrote:
| This was my take from the article also. These languages are
| clearly dying and not many people speak them as their primary
| language so the human suffering is minimal. Which means keeping
| them around is a past time that some people happen to enjoy
| (unless there is a Saphir-Whorf hypothesis I'm missing)
|
| But the sentence `well-meaning Wikipedians who think that by
| creating articles in minority languages they are in some way
| "helping" those communities` clearly shows the author hasn't
| really considered the issue.
| phantomathkg wrote:
| I thought the argument point is letting it die is OK, but
| letting wrongfully translated text, becoming the source of AI
| to chuck out wrongfully translated text is not OK.
| ratg13 wrote:
| It's ironic that the "solution" to the problem is being driven by
| yet another person that isn't native to Greenland.
|
| While they may be a Greenlandic teacher, it's almost assured that
| they are teaching western Greenlandic, which is similar to
| Canadian Inuktitut.
|
| People in the East of Greenland speak a language that has
| similarities, but is different enough in vocabulary and sounds
| that it's often considered a separate language and not a dialect.
|
| When people from East and West Greenland come together, they
| typically speak Danish because they can't understand each other
| in their own native language.
|
| So we're talking about a country that has 55k people and a
| portion of them don't even speak the official language.. This guy
| would have no way of knowing whether something was written poorly
| by a computer or a poorly educated greenlandic native that maybe
| isn't so good with the official language.
|
| Given that the majority of the country's citizens do not use the
| internet at all, it is not even clear what his solution is other
| than just deciding to be some sort of magic arbiter .. which is
| not realistic or sustainable.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| > Given that the majority of the country's citizens do not use
| the internet at all
|
| On what do you base this assertion? I was not able to find up-
| to-date statistics, but 72% of participants in this survey from
| 2013 had internet access at home, either via PC or via mobile
| devices, and another 11% had internet access elsewhere:
|
| https://digitalimik.gl/-/media/datagl/old_filer/strategi_201...
| Uehreka wrote:
| I wish people on HN would stop acting like "magic arbiter"
| solutions are "not realistic", when in reality it's the only
| way things have every worked. Are federal judges "magic
| arbiters"? Yes. Do judges make bad calls? Yes. Do we not like
| when large numbers of judges who are unfriendly to our side get
| life appointments? Yes. Has anyone proposed an actual better
| way of solving these kinds of problems? No.
|
| So to get back to the point: Yes the solution is to appoint
| someone a magic arbiter, and hope they don't screw up. The fact
| that it's a deeply imperfect way of solving problems doesn't
| mean it's not workable. It just means it will backfire at some
| point, and someone else will get appointed instead.
| vacuity wrote:
| > Has anyone proposed an actual better way of solving these
| kinds of problems? No.
|
| This is the heart of the matter. Nothing is good or bad in a
| vacuum, but when two things (say, outcomes) can be compared,
| distintions can be drawn. Noticing flaws in the present can't
| be contrasted with simple models of "the better solution";
| this is comparing apples to oranges. Address both the good
| and the bad of the present, including the days where nothing
| noteworthy happens and therefore below the awareness of most
| people, and the good and the bad of an elaborated
| counterpart.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| As someone who isn't a native English speaker, I believe most
| people who use the Internet would benefit from simply learning
| English rather than having an unchecked AI translate things to
| them. Reddit for example has joined millions of terrible
| Wordpress websites in auto-translating everything for SEO
| purposes and Google seems to be fine with this for some reason.
| It's ironic that it has reached the point that if you search
| for a "multi-language" plugin for Wordpress, most of the
| results aren't about letting you write an article in multiple
| languages, they're just about automatically translating a
| single article to 30 languages with machine translation.
|
| The reason none of this makes sense to me is that it's
| intellectually crippling Internet users. Computers and the
| Internet are tools. If you want something machine translated to
| you, you can use a tool like Google translate to translate it
| for you. If the webmaster does this, it robs people from the
| opportunity to learn to use those tools and they become
| dependent on third parties to do this for them when they would
| have a lot more freedom if they just did it themselves (or if
| they learned English).
|
| Teach a man to fish...
| spookie wrote:
| A lot of written text out there in other languages isn't
| available in English, simply put you have many eco chambers
| of singular languages out there. Most people are ok with just
| reading what they understand.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You miss an advantage. If everything is inter-translated,
| then you can do your search in the language you know and find
| the answer written in a language you didn't know.
| bawolff wrote:
| > People in the East of Greenland speak a language that has
| similarities, but is different enough in vocabulary and sounds
| that it's often considered a separate language and not a
| dialect.
|
| If this is true, then the easy solution would be to just have
| two separate wikipedia editions (assuming there is interest).
|
| After all if we have en, sco, jam and ang, surely there is room
| for two greenlandics. The limitting factor is user interest.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > the easy solution would be to just have two separate
| wikipedia editions (assuming there is interest)
|
| That's... a reach.
|
| An _easier_ , and much more realistic, solution would be to
| just have one edition in Danish, which was already noted as
| the language Greenlanders have in common.
| bawolff wrote:
| Well, is the point to have greenlanders be able to read it,
| or is it to preserve a dying language?
| simonw wrote:
| I'm surprised this story didn't mention the scandal with Scots
| Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-
| an-aw-...
|
| > an American teenager - who does not speak Scots, the language
| of Robert Burns - has been revealed as responsible for almost
| half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia
|
| It wasn't malicious either, it was someone who started editing
| Wikipedia at 12 and naively failed to recognise the damage they
| were doing.
| TZubiri wrote:
| The Cebuano wiki is a similar case, not spoken often, but it
| was a personal project of an editor that was mad at political
| articles and started making animal articles in the Cebuano
| wiki.
|
| The solution is to differentiate and tag inputs and outputs,
| such that outputs can't be fed as inputs recursively. Funnily
| enough, wikipedia's sourcing policy does this perfectly, not
| only are sources the input and page content is just an output,
| but page content is a tertiary source, and sources by policy
| should be secondary (and sometimes primary) sources, so the
| system is even protected against cross tertiary source
| pollution (say an encyclopedia feeding off wikipedia and
| viceversa).
|
| It is only when articles posing as secondary sources fail to
| cite wikipedia that a recursive quality loss can occur, see
| [[citogenesis]]
| galagawinkle489 wrote:
| Many sources for Wikipedia articles refer to Wikipedia
| without citing it. Many journalists will work from Wikipedia,
| and most of Wikipedia's sources are journalistic articles. It
| happens to be that often this isn't noticed because the
| information obtained this way is true and uncontroversial.
| Citogenesis only documents examples where, by bad luck, the
| result is untrue information.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It is only when articles posing as secondary sources fail
| to cite wikipedia that a recursive quality loss can occur
|
| I've seen a college professor cite wikipedia in support of a
| false claim. On investigation, the text in wikipedia was
| cited to an earlier blog post by that same professor.
|
| I wasn't convinced.
| debtta wrote:
| The background here is that Scots is not really a language. Try
| asking a Glasgow taxi driver who addresses you in 'Scots'
| whether he knows any English. Robert Burns wrote in English,
| with some of his spelling reflecting pronunciation in the
| Scottish English dialect.
|
| The people who want it to be considered as a language for
| political reasons cannot be bothered to translate Wikipedia
| themselves. They read and edit English Wikipedia and understand
| it perfectly.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Scots is somewhat partially intelligible in written form to
| English speakers, but that does not make it the same language
| as English. You might as well say that Spanish and Portuguese
| are the same language.
| mikemcquaid wrote:
| Sort of?
|
| The Glaswegian taxi driver may not consider themself to be
| speaking a different language but, if speaking to another
| local and leaving aside pronunciation, they'd use words,
| phrases and even grammar that's incomprehensible to someone
| with no experience with Scots.
|
| I'm a "posh Scot", raised middle class in Edinburgh so my
| accent is minimal and thickens up or softens depending on who
| I'm speaking to. Even for me, there's a lot of words, phrases
| and ways of speaking I've had to adjust to be consistently
| understood by American coworkers when over the last 10+
| years.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Brits do the same. At best it is a dialect at worst an
| accent. A lot of (most of) Scots is still English but
| spoken with different grammar or unfamiliar phrases and
| unfamiliar pronunciation.
|
| Sort of like extreme cockney rhyming slang or for a more
| modern example thick BME* full of slang.
|
| * = British Multicultural English, think fam n blud, lots
| of Jamaican english influence plus south east asian
| influence.
| mig39 wrote:
| > The background here is that Scots is not really a language.
|
| This is supremely ignorant. Scots is its own language. It's a
| 'brother' or 'sister' of English, with both English and Scots
| being descendants of West Germanic languages.
|
| The fact that many (all?) Scots speakers also speak English
| doesn't mean Scots not a language on its own.
|
| You could make your exact same arguments that Irish isn't a
| language because you could ask a Cork taxi driver whether he
| knows any English.
|
| Scots = a language with some of the same ancestors as
| English.
|
| Scottish English = a dialect (and accent) of English
|
| Scots Gaelic = another language, with the same ancestors as
| Irish and Manx.
| overfeed wrote:
| What counts as a language _is_ almost always determined by
| "political reasons" - as the witticism goes: "A language is a
| dialect with an army and navy."
|
| There exists dialects that are less mutually intelligible
| than apparently distinct languages, and the designation of
| each as "dialect" or "language" is political. Language is
| often a proxy for culture, and political actors may wish to
| suppress or boost the legitimacy of such cultural expression
| depending on their aims.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that
| perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed.
|
| That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or
| worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to
| contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and
| instead must rely on other languages.
|
| The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with
| translated articles that contains error isn't much. They should
| instead close that version of Wikipedia until there are enough
| volunteers.
| consp wrote:
| That last part creates a chicken and egg problem. You can argue
| about it but I will bet it will never get traction if there is
| no basis to start from.
| bawolff wrote:
| Wikipedia has an "incubator" setup where people can start
| working on a language in the incubator until it demonstrates
| enough interest.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The end of the article says they have closed it.
| Mars008 wrote:
| > who use AI translator or worst like Google translate
|
| It's the same. Google translate uses trained AI models.
| tomlockwood wrote:
| > they don't deserve to have one
|
| By what unholy pact have you been beknighted as the bestower of
| wikis, my friend?
| mslt wrote:
| Not the commenter but in this instance it seems like if you
| want something you need to either be able make/maintain it or
| fund someone who will, no?
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| If the original authors stop maintaining an OSS project, and
| you are one of only a very few users, you have two options:
| do the work yourself, or watch it die. If you are unwilling
| to do the work yourself, then that's a signal it isn't
| important enough for anyone else to do the work either.
|
| Why should a wiki be any different?
| tdeck wrote:
| It is worse. Imagine if you were trying to learn English from
| this phrasebook, written by someone who didn't speak English:
|
| https://www.exclassics.com/espoke/espkpdf.pdf
|
| Wikipedia is prominent. Wikipedia articles in a language
| without much representation become prime examples of that
| language to those who read them.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Jesus. What did I just read?
| tdeck wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke
| yorwba wrote:
| "Only one or two" isn't zero. The problem isn't that a small
| community can only write a small Wikipedia, but that there's a
| global supply of fools who want to make every small Wikipedia
| bigger, even if they're completely unqualified to do so.
|
| Wikipedia is built around the basic principle that if you just
| let everyone contribute, most contributions will be helpful and
| you can just revert the bad ones after the fact. This works for
| large communities that easily outnumber the global supply of
| fools, but below a certain size threshold, the sign flips and
| the average edit makes that version of Wikipedia worse rather
| than better.
|
| So smaller communities probably need to flip the operating
| principle of Wikipedia on its head and limit new users to only
| creating drafts, on the assumption that most will be useless,
| and an admin can accept the good ones after the fact.
|
| I'm not sure whether Wikipedia already has the software
| features necessary to operate it in such a closed-by-default
| manner.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Wikipedia editors is among the many communities that have for a
| long time mostly successfully relied on the tendency of
| relatively superficial, easy to validate capabilities (such as
| being able to use a website, write something resembling real
| language, and handle basic communication) to correlate with more
| valuable but harder to validate qualities (such as ability to
| write reasonably well and follow rules/guidelines, and generally
| being a well-intentioned person) as one of their main barriers to
| entry. Attributable to the deluge of commercial LLMs[0] available
| at such low prices that their operators lose millions to billions
| of dollars in order to gain market share and ultimately profit,
| such communities may not be able to continue to exist as is for
| long, I suspect: either they would be forced to institute more
| intrusive barriers (be that ID verification, invite-only
| memberships, or something else) while the deluge lasts, or they
| may be effectively destroyed when members secretly lacking the
| requisite qualities and act in bad faith become a majority,
| damage community's reputation, and drive out the existing
| members.
|
| [0] Which paradoxically to a significant degree exist thanks to
| the unpaid work of volunteers in many of such communities.
| muldvarp wrote:
| LLMs destroying Wikipedia would be incredibly sad and is one of
| the things that makes me think that LLMs will have a strong
| negative impact on the lives of most people.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| I have previously translated a very small handful of redlink
| articles into English from another language. Chasing down the
| sources in the other language and synthesising and cross-
| referencing with English sources is a fun challenge. To the
| best of my knowledge, I did an OK job.
|
| While translation tools are a godsend for that, as well as
| life in general when dealing with a language I am not that
| good at, LLMs make me increasingly reluctant to do that much
| more because there is no way I could detect AI slop in a
| second language. For all I know I'd be translating junk into
| English and enabling translingual citogenesis.
|
| Bad as the slopwave is for native speakers, it's absolutely
| brutal for non-native speakers when you can't pick up on the
| tells. Maybe the gap will narrow and narrow until the slop is
| stylistically imperceptible.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| That happens by default in low-resource languages, no bad
| translations needed. They don't have enough either written
| material to train an LLM, or labels for time periods and various
| dialects in a continuum. For example even the best multilanguage
| models will lump up all Berber languages into one unstable
| abomination nobody speaks, usually writing it in Neo-Tifinagh.
| Not much can be done about that, training a model in all
| varieties of these would require a huge specialized effort.
| 1f60c wrote:
| And it's a lot more profitable to improve sex mode than to hire
| a small army of native speakers to make it not suck at
| Greenlandic.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| What makes Greenlandic special among ~7000 languages in the
| world? Most of them are low-resource as well. To train a
| model in all of them you also need a ton of specialized
| linguists and ML people, neither of which grow on trees. And
| it's only one thing generalist models are supposed to master,
| out of many. The scale is impossible, this needs to be done
| by models themselves when (if) they get smart enough.
| bradley13 wrote:
| I've lived in a couple of countries where there is a "vulnerable"
| language. I understand the emotional attachment that the native
| speakers have to their language.
|
| However, in the larger picture: languages evolve. New ones
| develop, old ones die. Do artificial attempts to "rescue" a
| language really make sense?
| tdeck wrote:
| It makes no less sense than any other work done to protect or
| restore something created by human beings. This comment is no
| more insightful than saying "cathedrals burn down, do
| artificial attempts to 'restore them' make sense?"
| mort96 wrote:
| Languages evolve, but it's _probably_ bad when language
| evolution is driven by bad AI slop translations made by people
| who have no relation to the language.
| internet_points wrote:
| The AI slopwave is about as close to natural linguistic
| evolution as world war 2 was to natural selection (..aaand
| there we hit godwin's law, I'll see myself out)
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Wow, fuck that site. I had to dismiss 2 cookie banners and 3
| popups before I could even read anything, then the second I
| scrolled one pixel another one popped up.
| Pooge wrote:
| Sounds like you don't use the modern-day condom: uBlock Origin.
|
| I live in Europe (famous place for becoming professional banner
| clicker) and I didn't get one single distraction.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| I am on mobile, I should have said that.
| user205738 wrote:
| ublock origin works on mobile in Firefox, Waterfox, etc.
|
| There is Brave with its blocker, there is AdGuard, which
| blocks ads on websites and applications, regardless of the
| browser.
| tim333 wrote:
| That's odd. I didn't get much.
| r2vcap wrote:
| While it makes sense that LLMs and machine translation systems
| primarily rely on English Wikipedia as a data source, depending
| on smaller-language Wikipedias for training is far less ideal.
| English Wikipedia is generally well-regulated by its community,
| but many other language editions are not -- so treating all of
| Wikipedia as an authoritative source is misguided.
|
| For instance, my mother tongue's Wikipedia (Korean Wikipedia)
| suffers from serious governance issues. The community often
| rejects outside contributors, and many experienced editors have
| already moved to alternative platforms. As a result, I sometimes
| get mixed, low-quality responses in my native language when using
| LLMs.
|
| Ultimately, we need high-quality open data. Yet most Korean-
| language content is locked behind walled gardens run by chaebols
| like Naver and Kakao -- and now they're lobbying the government
| to fund their own "sovereign AI" projects. It's a lose-lose
| situation.
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