A general question for HN: Are there any translation services that I can recommend that people use instead just asking a standard AI to translate in the naive way? I'm saddened by the number of times I'm seeing non-native speakers get tarred with using an AI because the naive way an LLM translates slathers its own style on top of the translation rather than being a more faithful translation.
Standard translation services lack the understanding of LLMs and LLMs are hilariously prone to these AI tells, even when you ask to avoid them.
I try to learn writing and copywriting directly in english to avoid the awkward translation effect, but I focus more on the rythm, structure and content than the prasing itself
i believe that the big ones, bing, google, even deepl are all using AI to translate. the variation and the mistranslations i sometimes get are to wild.
i wish the translation tool would tell me if it can't directly translate a word because of misspellings or abbreviations. i learned that i have to write in a very explicit straight forward way, with each sentence standing on its own to make sure i get sensible translations.
> because the naive way an LLM translates slathers its own style on top of the translation rather than being a more faithful translation.
If you're sincere then I'm afraid you're being led on by the lazy.
When tasked with translating a document, unless instructed otherwise, the LLM does not inject its own cliched stories, narrative structures and assorted engagement tricks.
Of course not. What it does seem to do is inject its grammar, style, and propensity for certain constructs that cause people to flag it as "AI" in their brain.
It's possible they're all lying. It's very unlikely that zero of them are lying, as I happen to be in a place where I get exposed to this, so I've seen it a lot. But I've seen it an awful lot for it all to be liars.
Unfortunately, I don't speak a foreign language fluently enough to test it myself. I have some I can kind of verify that the translation is literally accurate but I don't have any second language I could do a style translation for.