45
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
45 points (95.9% liked)
Asklemmy
42523 readers
848 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
In two languages I'm learning, German and Chinese, I've found it to suffer from "translationese". It's grammatically correct, but the sentence structure and word choice feel like the answer was first written in English then translated.
No single sentence is wrong, but overall it sounds unnatural and has none of the "flavor" of the language. That also makes it bad for learning - it avoids a lot of sentence patterns you'll see/hear in day to day life.
Curious, maybe it was trained using existing translation tech rather than being trained on actual examples of the language like it was for English?
As a native German speaker I agree that ChatGPT is very English-flavored. I think it's just because the sheer amount of English training data is so much larger that the patterns it learned from that bleed over into other languages. Traditional machine translations are also often pretty obvious in German, but they are more fundamentally wrong in a way that ChatGPT isn't.
It's also somewhat cultural. The output you get from ChatGPT often sounds overly verbose and downright ass-kissing in German, even though I know I wouldn't get that impression from the same output in English, simply because the way you communicate in professional environments is vastly different. (There is no German equivalent to "I hope this email finds you well", for example.)
"Ich hoffe, diese Nachricht erreicht Sie." Would work, but I haven't seen it used too. I also haven't seen the English version, but that makes sense, as I work for a German company.
Yeah I mean you can translate it literally, but it means nothing. The English equivalent of what it communicates in German would be more like "I hope this email gets delivered to you." which is just a weird thing to say.
Wouldn't you just write "ich hoffe Ihnen geht es gut" If you wanted to express concern about the other person's well-being?
Yeah, but even that is stretching it for a work email unless there is a concrete reason you'd be concerned, like you know they're dealing with stuff. Otherwise โ at least in my northern German circles โ that's already getting pretty personal
Yeah, as a fellow northern German I would never write that either. Maybe on a greeting card.