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LLMs are extremely good at translation, given that the transformer was literally built for that.


Maybe in some cases. But generally speaking the consensus in the language translation industry is that NMT (e.g. Google Translate) still provides higher quality than current gen LLMs.


Is it? Anecdotally, even GPT 3.5 felt better than Google Translate; where we are with GPT-4o, it feels both better in terms of quality, accuracy and context awareness and it has a much better UI/UX. Like, I can't tell Google Translate it picked the wrong translation for a specific phrase (I thing I could in the past, but this feature seems missing), or otherwise inform it of extra context.

(Also LLMs are wonderful at solving the "tip of my tongue" problem - "what's the English word for $this doing $that, kind of like $example1 but without $aspect1?...")


It’s entirely possible that the language translation industry is trailing behind.

It’s also possible that the cost of LLMs outweigh their benefit for this specific use case.

The only vendor I know of doing LLM translation in production is DeepL, and only supports 3 languages, launched last week.


Why? Already ChatGPT-3.5 seemed better to me than Google Translate when I compared them a while ago.




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