Remix.run Logo
altairprime 9 hours ago

Do the best that you can unassisted. There is a chasm of difference between someone coming into English from another language, and someone using Google Translate to submit a post originating another language. French aphorisms are a stellar example of this: I’d rather read “A bird in the bush may not fly into oven” and have to parse out the meaning, than have some AI translate it as “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch”; sure, there’s an iffy [the] grammatical moment at ‘fly into oven’, but it’s such a distinct phrase and carries a lot more room for contextual nuance than having an AI substitute in an American aphorism with machine translation allows for.

(For example: If I’m trying to express a point about how we shouldn’t assume that dinner isn’t “her duty” but is instead “our duty”, a French-like aphorism expressed in English literally as “the chicken won’t fly into the oven unprompted” could plausibly be AI-translated instead as “don’t count your chickens before they hatch”, doing catastrophic damage to the point. To a machine translator those two aphorisms are not distinctive; but they are, even if it’s a weird expression in common U.S. English.)