These discussions are about Gen AI and LLMs so if you were relying on those you’ve never understood jack shit because it doesn’t “translate data” for you it produces slop based on random number generators approximating human work.
Serious question - is there a non-AI tool that can translate biological research into something I can understand?
I’ll usually try the browser’s built in translation tool, but that is already an LLM anyway, isn’t it?
When I try to read serious research and not just photo captions often times it just becomes useless word salad since it can’t handle technical terminology. Someone once suggested I try the free Deepl translation, and that has been the most consistent thing to handle jargon.
I’m not a techie person, so I don’t know every option out there. A lot of what I want to read is studies about rare animals, and I’m stuck with what languages the studies are written in. It’s very niche stuff and nobody out there is in a rush to translate it by hand. If you’ve got a more ethical tool that can get the job done, I’d be more than happy to try it.
If you think I’m a garbage human for translating maybe 6 or 8 groundbreaking papers a year, you’re entitled to your opinion, and it is what it is, but if your solution for me is to just stay ignorant and not try to learn all I can about what I’m passionate about, then yeah, we’re not going to agree on this.
FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 3 days ago
horse@feddit.org 3 days ago
If you think AI tools can’t translate texts you must have never tried. I speak two languages natively and sometimes use AI tools to translate text between them, because it is simply a lot faster than doing it by hand. Being able to speak both languages I can easily confirm that the AI translated texts are at least as good as what I could produce myself. It’s a really useful tool for that purpose.
If you hate AI on principle, that’s fine. You’re entitled to your opinion. But to say it doesn’t work is just simply wrong.
pheonixdown@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I think it’s a problem with the term AI being co-opted by the LLM shills. From my quick research DeepL, their original model, appears to be a CNN based translator, which is different from GenAI architecture. Based on what Wikipedia says about the source data, it seems fairly ethical. Their training computer uses hydropower, also more ethical than most in the AI space. The only morally questionable thing I see is that the company has other GenAI models, but if you’re using the free version, that doesn’t really seem like an issue to me. Overall, I wouldn’t feel negatively about using the original DeepL model.
anon6789@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Thanks for all the info. The free translation is all I’ve ever used. I don’t want it doing anything more than a literal translation of text. The whole reason I want to read the papers is so I can generate my own summaries, opinions, and so on. The model doing that would take all the fun away from me.