Of course they are not perfect, but no translation is even close to perfect. The floor is actually incredibly low. All I can say is that many doctoral-level scholars, including myself and some academic publishers, find them to be somewhere between serviceable and better than average.

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applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Knowing the quality of LLM translations between the two languages I speak, hearing it used like this by supposed academics invokes a deep despair in me. "Serviceable" is a flimsy excuse for mass-producing and publishing slop. Particularly given that slop will displace efforts to produce human translations, putting a ceiling on humanity's future output - no one will ever aspire to do better than slop, so instead of a few great translations, we'll get more slop than we would ever even want to read.

I guess it does depend on the languages involved; one study suggests that it's even worse than Google Translate for some languages, but maybe actually okay at English<-->Spanish?

> There were 132 sentences between the two documents. In Spanish, ChatGPT incorrectly translated 3.8% of all sentences, while GT incorrectly translated 18.1% of sentences. In Russian, ChatGPT and GT incorrectly translated 35.6% and 41.6% of all sentences, respectively. In Vietnamese, ChatGPT and GT incorrectly translated 24.2% and 10.6% of sentences, respectively.

https://jmai.amegroups.org/article/view/9019/html

	▲	sgc 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wouldn't have put it online if I didn't think it was a major improvement over nothing. Realistically, if we haven't translated it in the last 500 years, there is no point for the next several hundred years of history to stick with nothing as well. It takes a bit more than pasting sentences in chatGPT to get a serviceable translation of course, but significantly better results than that are possible. I have not tried translating into other languages, but I am sure having English as the target language is a help. It's all right there on my website in parallel text, everybody can check and come to their own conclusion rather than driving by with unhelpful generalizations. And really, that is the primary scope of these translations: as aids in reading an original text.