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Notes -
Do the common LLMs even produce the most obvious tells if you tell them to just translate a piece of text from language A to language B?
In my experience, yes, text translated by a general-purpose LLM tool often still sounds like it came from an LLM. Gemini will even go as far as restructuring the text into the "bullet points that each start with a bolded word or phrase" style it likes sometimes, without informing the user it's done so.
Huh. That'd suck.
FWIW, the free tier ChatGPT translated your comment to Finnish while keeping the structure reasonably close to the original (keeping in mind that Finnish grammar is completely different from English).
Doing the same to the OG comment results in stilted sounding text that nobody would write and some obvious translated grammar issues, but still no obvious LLMisms that I notice. Perhaps those depend on the used language?
Could be! Most of my experience has been reading/revising text translated into English by LLMs.
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Laughing my ass off at the idea of ChatGPT translating some Korean grunt's journal entry as, "you're right, today's victory not only ensures the survival of worker's communism, but ten thousand years of Kim Il Sung."
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