A few months ago I complained that automatic translation sucks when you translate between two languages which are not English, and that the result is the same as if you translated through English. When translating between two Slavic languages, even sentences where you practically just had to transcribe Cyrillic to Latin and change a few vowels, both Google Translate and DeepL succeeded to randomize the word order, misgender every noun, and mistranslate concepts that happen to be translated to English as the same word.
I tried some translation today, and from my perspective, Claude is almost perfect. Google Translate sucks the same way it did before (maybe I am not fair here, I did not try exactly the same text), and DeepL is somewhere in between. You can give Claude a book and tell to translate it to another language, and the result is pleasant to read. (I haven’t tried other LLMs.)
This seems to support the hypothesis that Claude is multilingual in some deep sense.
I assume that Google Translate does not prioritize English on purpose, it’s just that it has way more English texts that any other language, so if e.g. two Russian words map to the same English word, it treats it as strong evidence that those two words are the same. Claude can see that the two words are used differently, and can match them correctly to corresponding two words in a different language. (This is just a guess; I don’t really understand how these things work under the hood.)
A few months ago I complained that automatic translation sucks when you translate between two languages which are not English, and that the result is the same as if you translated through English. When translating between two Slavic languages, even sentences where you practically just had to transcribe Cyrillic to Latin and change a few vowels, both Google Translate and DeepL succeeded to randomize the word order, misgender every noun, and mistranslate concepts that happen to be translated to English as the same word.
I tried some translation today, and from my perspective, Claude is almost perfect. Google Translate sucks the same way it did before (maybe I am not fair here, I did not try exactly the same text), and DeepL is somewhere in between. You can give Claude a book and tell to translate it to another language, and the result is pleasant to read. (I haven’t tried other LLMs.)
This seems to support the hypothesis that Claude is multilingual in some deep sense.
I assume that Google Translate does not prioritize English on purpose, it’s just that it has way more English texts that any other language, so if e.g. two Russian words map to the same English word, it treats it as strong evidence that those two words are the same. Claude can see that the two words are used differently, and can match them correctly to corresponding two words in a different language. (This is just a guess; I don’t really understand how these things work under the hood.)