the state of LLM has changed a lot over the past year since that evaluation write-up. I use LLM/NLP every day for my work, and the leaps in improvement is impressive. You'll need to be careful for sure. But I suggest you try it. Do it using 2 separate LLM agents (different models, not just different model versions) and use a 3rd to evaluate the 2 translations for semantic match and conflict resolve against original text. (just a suggestion, but you can play with it until you find a reliable workflow). Once the desired workflow is established, you can automate the pipeline. If all the documents you have are related in subject matter, you can create a feedback loop to help it improve. In short, if you only have 1 document to translate, then this won't be a time saver. But if you have a large corpus to translate (especially if it's a narrow domain) then a workflow like this can be a significant time savings. Good luck. Charlie
On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 12:52 PM Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide <[email protected]> wrote: > Werner LEMBERG <[email protected]> writes: > > > I thus wonder whether a guy with LLM experience could help with > > updating the German translation of the Notation Reference – or rather, > > generating a complete translation from scratch, since the German > > translation is severely outdated. Today, websites like Google > > Translate provide translations (both German-to-English and > > English-to-German) that are nearly perfect even for quite complicated > > grammatical structures, which still amazes me. > > My experience is that such a translation looks nearly perfect, but the > actual content contains hard to spot errors that can even inverse the > meaning of some sections. I tried that for an article of mine and did a > full evaluation. The result was that after I fixed all the errors (I > found), I didn’t actually save time -- despite being the author of the > original text: https://www.draketo.de/software/ai-translation-evaluated > > The worst errors (completely changed meaning): > https://www.draketo.de/software/ai-translation-evaluated#completely-changed > > Finding those errors is extremely hard, because the LLM is great at > fudging the text around the errors such that they sound like a correct > part of the text. > > > of technical terms will be mistranslated; we thus have to proofread > > the results (I volunteer for that). > > You may actually be faster (and the result better) if you directly > translate the new text with the old translation as reference. > > Except if the bottleneck for you is typing speed -- if you can read > English and German side by side much faster than you type one of them, > then an LLM may help by reducing the amount of text you need to type). > > Best wishes, > Arne > -- > Unpolitisch sein > heißt politisch sein, > ohne es zu merken. > https://www.draketo.de >
