 So… O’Reilly sent me email today hyping up how my books (really, just the one, I assume) is going to be AI-translated into Spanish and German, with other languages to follow. This was probably inevitable, but I still have concerns. First: are there no human translators of these languages? Second: who’s going to proof-read all 1,126 pages to make sure nothing got botched, especially given the technical nature of the content? The readers? Which isn’t even crowd-sourcing: it’s customer-sourcing. 12 comments
 @Meyerweb Human translators cost money. AI can do a bad job for more money (though it's probably OpenAI's money or something... so less money to the publisher), so why not? Do you give up your control over translations when you sign the publishing deal? @Meyerweb We’ve done a lot of work on AI-assisted translation at U.S. Digital Response for the past year. It can make a good first draft for a translator, but it is in no way a replacement for a human translator. @Meyerweb Amd that's a terrible idea. I've worked on Help documents with a first pass translation done by a specialized deliberately-created-for-the-purpose LLM, and that's not bad, but it's still double checked by humans  I really dislike the automatic translation on web.dev The problem with such translations is that there will be translated nearly everything. And many English words remain in German. We don't translate "browser", we just write it with a capital B 😜 @sebastianlaube @Meyerweb IIIRC that recently changed and your language choice is now persisted. (Looking at @tunetheweb to confirm) @bramus @sebastianlaube @Meyerweb It was persisted using the language drop down menu but not the more prominent “Switch to English” banner that appears at the top 😔 Fixed that about a year ago though after we moved to that infrastructure and immediately got complaints. It still depends on local storage though so in-app browsers and the like may still require a button click if they don't have access to your previous stored preference. |
Gregory's Server
@Meyerweb are you allowed to say "no"? Or does the contract say they can do that without your approval?