Does it? They had people writing articles in Spanish, knowing their Spanish-speaking audience and what would appeal to them. Now it’s just English articles translated into Spanish. Badly.
What?? You mean there’s more to translating media than scraping together the literaltranslation of one language to another and calling it done??
Nah, those Spanish folks will totally get all the English idioms and phrasing they’ve likely never heard of, and will totally not be confused over the piss poor machine translation effort
To be fair, translation engines like deepl.com do handle idioms pretty well compared to google translate. It probably depends on the idiom and the languages though. But even deepl is nowhere near perfect. Fine for random stuff to be understood but not good for a professional news website.
Have you not been paying attention to AI over the last year? It can easily go beyond just translating word for word. This isn’t Google Translate anymore.
How sure are you that idioms which don’t even have good translations will be accurately translated by the AI? How sure are you that there won’t be cultural misunderstandings which go beyond translation?
Gizmodo is a global tech news site, not a local news site. The majority of articles on the site are not region specific.
It makes sense to save costs by translating the articles instead of writing separate articles. The local editors can improve the quality of the translated articles, adding or modifying parts to appeal Spanish-speaking audience.
English is a region-specific language as much as Spanish is. A huge amount of the globe speaks Spanish and much of it shares a culture with significant differences from the English-speaking world and thus different interests.
The local editors can improve the quality of the translated articles, adding or modifying parts to appeal Spanish-speaking audience.
That assumes those local editors will be given any time to take on that extra workload of sorting through whatever translational errors the AI has done.
Even if an AI accurately translates the article text word for wrord, literal translation does not often equal accurate translation.
It makes sense for AI to do this kind of work.
But companies should hire editors to verify the results, including someone with local cultural knowledge.
Does it? They had people writing articles in Spanish, knowing their Spanish-speaking audience and what would appeal to them. Now it’s just English articles translated into Spanish. Badly.
What?? You mean there’s more to translating media than scraping together the literal translation of one language to another and calling it done??
Nah, those Spanish folks will totally get all the English idioms and phrasing they’ve likely never heard of, and will totally not be confused over the piss poor machine translation effort
Especially when it’s written in SEO-English which is frequently garbage in the first place.
I didn’t even think about the idioms. Excellent point.
To be fair, translation engines like deepl.com do handle idioms pretty well compared to google translate. It probably depends on the idiom and the languages though. But even deepl is nowhere near perfect. Fine for random stuff to be understood but not good for a professional news website.
Aren’t the English articles already written by an ai anyway? Doesn’t it make sense to have a more homogeneous chain of production?
Have you not been paying attention to AI over the last year? It can easily go beyond just translating word for word. This isn’t Google Translate anymore.
How sure are you that idioms which don’t even have good translations will be accurately translated by the AI? How sure are you that there won’t be cultural misunderstandings which go beyond translation?
Gizmodo is a global tech news site, not a local news site. The majority of articles on the site are not region specific.
It makes sense to save costs by translating the articles instead of writing separate articles. The local editors can improve the quality of the translated articles, adding or modifying parts to appeal Spanish-speaking audience.
English is a region-specific language as much as Spanish is. A huge amount of the globe speaks Spanish and much of it shares a culture with significant differences from the English-speaking world and thus different interests.
Not to take away from your point, but even the English speaking world can have significant differences among its regions.
Ads disguised as news stories.
That assumes those local editors will be given any time to take on that extra workload of sorting through whatever translational errors the AI has done.
Even if an AI accurately translates the article text word for wrord, literal translation does not often equal accurate translation.
Yeah, but actually we want everything cheap an with maximum profits. So…
Instead of 10 people you’ll need 1 person instead. Those 9 people will need to find a new gig.
you wouldn’t be saying this if you were impacted by this. ai translation is no where near at the same level as actual work done by localisers
Are you sure about that? With the advances to AI in the last year, something like that seems trivial
I will say this if I were impacted by this. And I will learn to use AI as a tool for my advantage.
What a glib thing to say