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Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 14, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Wow, you too? I find Gemini translates stuff really, really well. Or at least, I think it does, I cross-reference everything I put into it with Google Translate and sometimes it will apparently misunderstand something, or I'll open up a new private tab and have it translate it back to me and it's come out a little differently than I wanted it. I was told DeepL was supposed to be the best, but I somehow doubt it could be better than Gemini. I could be wrong.

The power of AI might shake up the closed nature of different language spheres of the Internet someday, I think. I had the fanciful idea that humans in other cultures would see things significantly differently from me, but I was surprised by how similar the lines of thought run. In almost every non-Arab country in the world, it seems that traditionalism is fighting a bloody battle against liberalism, and mostly losing.

Most recent models do really well! Translation is effectively solved since GPT 4, which was ages ago.

DeepL is good, but they're still better.

If you've successfully translated Chinese novels, can you recommend a model for translating from Chinese, but for someone that lives in China and doesn't want to use a VPN? I think Gemini is off-limits for them, and ChatGPT fucks with the writing style too much.

I believe that you should have access to Kimi K2, GLM and Qwen, which are the current best Chinese models. Can't imagine they'd be banned in China.