Hi Adrian, On 7/26/26 06:40, Adrian Bunk wrote:
I work in a bilingual company, and we have moved away from sender-provided translations specifically for that reason -- if I do not understand a sentence, I will usually try translation software first, but verify the grammar against the original to find out if the translation is correct, or the opposite of what was meant.
Most people in Debian might not be able to tell whether an email is written in Japanese or Korean, and would have to trust the translation blindly.
Yes, that is the point. Making the translation on the sender side means that all the recipients, including those who speak the original language, will have to trust the translation blindly, because the original was not transmitted.
That would require enough context to notice that it was mistranslated. For manual translations, there is a set of common mistakes; for LLM based translation, it is more likely that missing information is simply substituted.People on a mailing list receiving different translations of varying quality and sometimes opposite meanings of the same email in a discussion - that would be worse than everyone receiving the same bad translation where someone might notice when something sounds mistranslated.
For example, most translation software will simply take the Japanese 〜さん or 〜様 suffixes for names, and infer whether "Mr" or "Mrs" is the most likely choice based on its training corpus and context, such as inferring gender from whether a person's job title is typically associated with men or women in an US context, or whether a celebrity or politician with the same name was in the news recently[1].
The tendency of LLMs to mix verifiably correct and completely fabricated data together is precisely why reviewing LLM output is so difficult: there is a large amount of information, only a small part is wrong, yet *all* of it needs to be reviewed with full attention despite the user's wish to just be done with the task.
Basically, if someone wants a "copilot", they need to be a "pilot", and there is a reason why any flight school will put a lot of emphasis on "human factors" like fatigue, reduced attention on routine tasks and conflicting goals.
Simon [1] before training cutoff
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