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I think even a bad translation is better than no translation at all, but for some reason the majority of books don't seem to get translated. Why is that?

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[-] mech@feddit.org 23 points 2 days ago

There is no inherent value in it. A translation only makes sense if enough people will buy and read it to make it worth the effort and cost.
But I do think (actually fear), we'll soon get AI-translated e-books where you can select the language at checkout.

[-] solrize@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 days ago

For literary fiction, machine translation is near worthless. For tech stuff and maybe some nonfiction, it can be usable with some human cleanup. But ideally you can do the machine translation on your own computer if that's what you want.

[-] mech@feddit.org 9 points 2 days ago

YouTube voice auto-translation is completely worthless, but they still shove it down your throat.

[-] ganymede@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 days ago

and the translation will get progressively shitter the further into the story you go cos the compute resources start getting rate limited lol

[-] treadful@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago

But I do think (actually fear), we’ll soon get AI-translated e-books where you can select the language at checkout.

Hey, that might be one of the few things LLMs are properly suited for.

[-] Rothe@piefed.social 12 points 2 days ago

Not at all. Anyone who is bilingual and who have experienced LLM generated subtitles on videos knows they are really really bad at that. As soon as a word has multiple meanings they basically always choose the wrong one.

[-] idiomaddict@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

For some reason, subtitles are terrible, but if you plug a couple of pages into deepl, it’s pretty understandable. You need to clean it up a little, but that’s pretty easy. I am a language teacher, and actively have to design assignments so that my students can’t just plug them into deepl, because it renders them pointless (for about a third of the class, two thirds don’t clean anything up and it’s obvious).

this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
23 points (100.0% liked)

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