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genshiryoku t1_ja31syb wrote

I agree as a Japanese person that speaks English it's funny how extremely bad even the best AI tools are right now into translating Japanese into English. English to Japanese is a bit better but still not very good.

I recognize that it needs AGI to properly translate Japanese into English. Because Japanese lacks so much context that current AIs basically just "hallucinate" the missing context like how ChatGPT bullshits code when it doesn't know what to do.

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MysteryInc152 t1_ja5k3nk wrote

>I recognize that it needs AGI to properly translate Japanese into English.

Bilingual Large Language Models are basically human level translators. Or very close to it.

https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translations

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genshiryoku t1_ja6uw8w wrote

Not for Japanese. Due to how Japanese works it's essentially impossible to translate into English without having full context. This context isn't embedded within the language itself but conveyed through circumstance. This is why it's basically impossible to properly translate as AI models tend to hallucinate the missing context information and get it wrong.

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MysteryInc152 t1_ja78mbl wrote

Chinese, which is what the link focuses on has similar context issues. I understand the context problem you're talking about. A sentence can have multiple meanings until grounded in context.

Context can be derived from the language, just not necessarily in an isolated sentence. It may be derived from the sentence that precedes it. Bilingual LLMs have that figured out much better than traditional translation systems.

It's definitely possible for a preceding sentence to not have the context necessary but humans would struggle with that too.

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genshiryoku t1_ja7a86b wrote

Humans do struggle with it. Japanese as a language is vague on purpose so that you can always have plausible deniability to save face. This is great for cultural purposes but it's a nightmare for AI (or autistic people).

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