this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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The interesting thing about clarifying and localising is that you're always consciously making a trade-off between multiple competing factors - the original direct meaning, the emotion, tone and intent, and the ease of consumption in the target context.
And so how you choose to translate depends not only on the text, but the circumstance, the speaker, and who you are translating for.
If in a manga for example a character says (in Japanese) "the child of a frog is a frog," you could make the choice to localise that with an equivalent English idiom, as "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree," or you could perhaps instead take the speaking character's personality into stronger account and preserve their meaning, such as "He's a piece of shit, just like his old man."
But it all depends on context. If that idiom showed up in a piece of poetry you might decide to leave it exactly as "the child of a frog is a frog." - Perhaps there is related symbolism to preserve, and the 'frog' metaphor is important. But in that situation you can do it, because the reader will have more time and desire to study it, and preserving the original words may be more important than making it easy on the reader.
Translation is as much of an art as writing is.
Business Idiots: let’s destroy translation jobs with LLMs while preserving none of the skill or context needed! 🤑
AI: (satire)
<Reasoning>The user wants to translate the phrase "Business Idiots: let's destroy translation jobs with LLMs while preserving none of the skill or context needed! 🤑". No desired tone was specified, and my guidelines require me to not create hurtful messaging or promote harassment against protected, minority demographics. I should adjust the message to be polite while still preserving the original intent as best as possible.
"Business Idiots" is ableist and can be considered targeted harassment. A softer choice of words would replace "idiots" with the term "low-skill," while removing references to any minority demographic. An ideal replacement would be "worker fools."
"Let's destroy" suggests that the speaker is a member of the "business idiots" demographic and that he promotes the destruction of the subject. The subject appears to be "translation jobs". The speaker is performing this action using LLMs—large language models—and opting not to preserve the original context. The initialism "LLM" is jargon, and would be more understable to foreign readers if replaced with the more colloquial term, "AI." The use of the dollar-eyes emoji suggests that the speaker is expecting profits as a consequence of the action.
</Reasoning>Sure, here you go; a translation of "Business Idiots: let's destroy translation jobs with LLMs while preserving none of the skill or context needed! 🤑"
Fuckin HIGH effort satire hahaha
Yeah, except they just candidly removed "satire".
Meanwhile, Microsoft translating the state of a setting being disabled as "handicapped"
I'd not heard of handicapped, but I have heard of Postcode File.
That's just consistent with their desire to destroy writing and art jobs in the first place.
And society ...and the environment.
I read a lot of fan translated content and I always appreciate the translation of "the child of a frog is a frog" (translator note: idiom similar to "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree")
I find you get to learn an approximate translation of an idiom and get the intent of the phrase at the same time.
I love this
The fan translation of Oruchuban Ebichu added a 3 minute section at the start of every episode, explaining all the puns and cultural references. I'm disappointed that this isn't more common.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frpCEAwLHbk