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by leakycap 347 days ago
Which is horrifying: if an ESL author must publish in English and therefore does not have a full grasp of nuances and meaning conveyed by English wording, they should involve an editor... not a word machine that doesn't understand, either.

Wording matters when conveying information, ESL speakers should be working with fellow humans when publishing in a language they do not feel comfortable writing on their own.
2 comments
wanderingstan 347 days ago
As with many areas, it’s easier to recognize “correct” than to generate “correct.” When I lived in Germany I would often use the early online translation tools to help refine my written German and it was useful to see how they corrected it, and it was usually a matter of “of course that’s the right way, I see it now!”
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leakycap 347 days ago
I think you're generalizing widely between your experience and the ability of researchers publishing these millions of papers, which as of 2024 at least ~13% were being LLMed.

Seems important to know. LLMs lie and mislead and change meaning and completely ignore my prompt regularly. If I'm just trying to get my work out the door and in the editing phase, I don't trust myself to catch errors introduced by and LLM in my own work.

There is a lack of awareness of the importance of the conveyed meaning in text, not just grammatical correctness. Involving people, not word machines, is the right thing to do when improving content for publication.

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HappMacDonald 347 days ago
Does the grant cover an editor's involvement? How much does the experiment need to be trimmed back and the sample size need to be reduced: how much data must be sacrificed to support that?
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leakycap 347 days ago
If no one on a given team fluently speaks, writes, and understands the cultural context of the required output language, that team will need to find a solution.

It should not be a word machine (which, I should point out, does not have a brain)

Solving this problem might just involve using some of the resources to support the output being correct in the required language. You can call that a "cost"

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