What do translators think about GPT?
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN links it as an informed view from a working translator on using GPT for translation.
What it is
Tom Gally, a former professional translator and University of Tokyo professor, discusses in April 2023 how GPT-4 and similar models may affect translators' careers. He draws on Japanese-English translation experience.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2023 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Cites og_kalu · 2023-09 · on “”
>but nobody in the very well funded translation industry has a GPT powered translation engine for the key reason that it's not ready for production. Translator for 20 years talking about using GPT for Japanese-English. [LINK] [this video]
Cites tkgally · 2023-10 · on “ElevenLabs Launches Voice Translation Tool to Break Down Language Barriers”
I tried it on a video I made a few months ago. Here’s the original, in which I speak English: [this video] And here are the first two and a half minutes with me dubbed into Japanese: [LINK] Aside from some pacing problems, the voice and intonation sound quite good to me. But anyone listening to the translation alone would find it hard to follow, as the tool seems to have mistranscribed some of my English and mistranslated some of the rest. (I understand Japanese.) The dubbing would probably be a lot better if I had spoken English more slowly and with awareness that what I said would be interpreted into another language.
Cites fennecfoxy · 2023-10 · on “ElevenLabs Launches Voice Translation Tool to Break Down Language Barriers”
I think it did pretty well. No offense as your original video is still really great for a native English speaker (me) to listen to, but the English speech varies in pace a lot, sometimes you speak incredibly quickly, at such a pace that you even miss some syllables or blend them together for example [this video] it sounds like you said "technogial" or "technodule" rather than "tech-no-log-ical". So I can understand that a machine may make mistakes on this; don't worry, as a Kiwi I mumble and do this too ha ha. But the Japanese result is still already very very impressive even if I haven't spoken since I was 15 and over there on exchange (and stopped learning once I realise they romanise everythin
Cites tkgally · 2025-02 · on “Notes on OpenAI o3-mini”
As I explained in a sister comment, it is not possible to rate translation quality objectively, as opinions and positions about what constitutes a good translation vary. But in my tests of reasoning models since the release of o1-preview, they have not seemed as reliable as the straight nonreasoning versions of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. The translation process itself usually doesn’t seem to require the kind of multistep thinking those reasoning models can be good at. For more than a year, regular LLMs, when properly prompted, have been able to produce translations that would be indistinguishable from those of some professional translators for some types of translation. General-purpose LLMs