[asveikau]

I'll give you a very simple example I saw recently. I saw a dad joke in Spanish on social media and it gave me a chuckle. It was a comment to a lawyer's video and it translates to "can I study law if I'm a leftie?" It relies on the fact that law is also a word for "right".

AI won't be able to succinctly translate that joke and have it hit the same way. As an experiment I just fed that into ChatGPT, and it did explain the pun in 6 paragraphs with quotations and a bulleted list, but that kills the simplicity of the humor.

[mcswell]

I once saw a political cartoon that said "No votar basura." It played on the homophony between 'votar' = "to vote" and 'botar' = "to throw out."

That said, there are plenty of jokes in English. Stop me if you've heard this one...

[Thraway198]

It can't now. It will be able to in the future, when the translation actually becomes fluent for the user.

[asveikau]

My point is that a succinct and correct translation for the pun does not exist in the target language.

[Thraway198]

My point is that the AI will have that info understood as part of "being a translator," and react accordingly. The phenomenon you're describing is a basic fact of linguistics. Many things don't have direct translations, but they are still translated by fluent speakers of both languages.

[asveikau]

I am fluent in both languages and I can't succinctly translate it.

If I changed the meaning of the sentence, I could say, "can I study civil rights if I'm a lefty?"

If it were text, I might give you the translation I already gave yesterday and add a footnote explaining the pun.

Neither of these are ideal. One changes the meaning, the other is hard to understand.

[Thraway198]

Ok, so if a human, which is at the top of this ability to translate, choose this route.

What's the problem with an LLM-translatoin bot doing it? It would just do that, give a possible translation, and explain the issue.