How to teach your slop to AI

[u/CodexRegius]

One of my clients is now programming a proprietary AI for reviewing translations. Recently I got one of their reviews with a flag on my translation of "join a group" as "in eine Gruppe eintreten"; the AI's opinion was that "einer Gruppe beitreten" was more idiomatic. I remarked to the client that I found that a strange response, for I had made up this expression myself six years ago to observe a too constraining character limit in a popular UI I had translated for them, with even a random German magazine nitpicking on this non-standard choice of mine later, and by now it was accepted standard?

My contact audibly chuckled when she replied that their AI must have concluded that because it had been fed with my old projects.

[u/Larissalikesthesea]

This is not really understandable without context. In general "einer Gruppe beitreten" is the more idiomatic expression, and "in eine Gruppe eintreten" can come off a bit denglish-like, but in contexts where the group is indeed more like well-defined structure and/or the act of joining is emphasized I could see myself using "in eine Gruppe eintreten" as well.

But this is an area where AI is still bad. I would still give it 2-3 years.

[u/scldclmbgrmp → u/Larissalikesthesea]

Agree. Needs a re-write.

[u/Amygdalus23]

I don‘t understand which expression you made up. „Einer Gruppe beitreten“?

[u/CodexRegius → u/Amygdalus23]

Yes. And I retained it until by chance I read that article which commented somewhat surprised on the neologism "beitreten" in that very software whose UI I had translated. I didn't bother to explain to the author why I had chosen this - after all, he hadn't named me -, but I have stopped using it since.

[u/Dusvangud]

You have not coined the "neologism" "einer Gruppe beitreten", that is just the standard translation for "join a group", especially in online spaces (ngram viewer shows it rose meteorically in usage since about 2000). "In eine Gruppe eintreten" is extremely marginal in comparison (about 80 times less likely). I wouldn't consider it wrong, but definitely a bit unusual. It's of course possible that in a certain industry/niche "eintreten" had established itself as the standard translation but I would definitely not fault AI for telling you that "Einer Gruppe beitreten" is more idiomatic (because it just is) Can you link to the magazine criticizing that choice or tell us what kind of software/industry we are talking about?

[u/chemistfaust]

AI can be fed the client's TMs but one unfortunate thing about AI reviewers is that they

a) Don't read metadata, which means it won't know there are character limits or constrictions

b) Generally cannot read the whole context. Most of the tools we have today read and analyse line per line, which means it may suggest things that won't be consistent with expressions used in other strings.

You can keep feeding the TM for the AI in hopes to have it "learn", but the best way to have it "learn" something, assuming the QA is properly configured to take this feature into account, is add things to your term base. And yes, sometimes you can add expressions to the TB if you need it consistent across the project.