@thepurpleoctopus@lgbtqia.space
2026-11-04 12:59 UTC
Replies (3)
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@alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space 2026-11-04 13:06
@thepurpleoctopus@lgbtqia.space Given that AI is not sentient, it cannot communicate. Ergo, it cannot translate human speech from one language to another as it has zero conception about context.
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@onekind@beige.party 2026-11-04 15:17
@thepurpleoctopus@lgbtqia.space AI has access to all the same cues and context a human listener would have when they are both working with audio. I am testing AI models for translating audio into text where I have known-good human translations to compare the output to. It isn't perfect but it surprises me now and then by picking semantically appropriate alternatives to the literal wording. GPTs refer backwards up the sentence tree to find words and phrases that determine the contextual likelihood of the next word in the sentence. When you use a large model on audio, it can pick up phatics, hesitation, intonation, cadence — all sorts of subtle signals as to inflection and contextual meaning. I recognise that AI is gutting the translation industry. That's taking bread out of my friend @AnthoDerv@famichiki.jp's mouth and I'm furious about the business models that are causing that. I do the testing work because in my field (public health) every second WASP practitioner is going 'finally I can communicate with those [ethnicity] people without having to run a focus group and pay for translation.' My goal is to identify the safety risks if they all charge down that path. But the bad news is the tech is actually pretty sophisticated. AI models lack two things by definition though: judgment, and experience. So an AI-translated or generated guidebook is going to give tourists a lousy experience because (a) it has no experience of travel or the locale and (b) it has no judgement of what's a good tourist experience. That's the place to focus the critique.
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@SteveClough@metalhead.club 2026-11-04 19:26
@thepurpleoctopus@lgbtqia.space Totally agree. I have looked into the translation process for the Bible. Which is from a few languages into one, and from a cultural context utterly lost to us. The process is immensely complex and involves a lot of comprehension of BOTH the source language and the object language. And I have worked with language speakers and translation services, and it is always preferred to translate INTO your native language, because that is the one you understand, and can express yourself best in. With all the nuance needed. Of course, an AI has no context and not native language.