AI Translations Are Adding ‘Hallucinations’ to Wikipedia Articles
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AI translated articles swapped sources or added unsourced sentences with no explanation, while others added paragraphs sourced from completely unrelated material.
  • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    32·
    4 months ago

    Language doesn’t translate word for word. Phrases don’t translate natively. But AI will still just translate word for word instead of structures of phrases.

    [emphasis mine]

    Expected to read “traditional translation tools” here!

    Since old Google Translate was terribly unnatural but now…[0]

    AI Killed My Job: Translators Few industries have been hit by AI as hard as translation. Rates are plummeting. Work is drying up. Translators are considering abandoning the field, or bankruptcy. These are their stories. BRIAN MERCHANT August 21, 2025 In July 2025, Microsoft researchers published a study that aimed to quantify the “AI applicability” of various occupations. In other words, it was an attempt to calculate which jobs generative AI could best do. At the bottom of the list: Translators and interpreters. The paper itself was strange (historians and paralegals took the second and third slots), but it underlined a talking point that’s been roundly discussed in the media: That translation work is uniquely vulnerable to AI. To wit: we put out the call for AI Killed My Job stories, heard from a lot of translators, interpreters, and video game localizers. bloodinthemachine.com

    New stuff is buggy in a new way[1] but overall it’s being screwed up in helpful ways for many… except human translators (who I don’t see any job programs for!) :-/

    [0] Ancient article

    [1] “output [is] often…homogeneous, blind to local details, or flat-out wrong“