TL;DR There are services that specialize in translating small phrases / paragraphs. Search tattoo translator services (but vet properly, there are fake ones too)
I found a few services while looking for a proper translator to turn a small phrase into Old Latin. I can't remember the services now (it was long ago) but there are professional translators, historians and college professors who moonlight on these sites doing small translations for a small fee. Some offer bulk translations of small phrases. One of the translators I got was a professor in classical text/literature/language (can't remember exactly) and another was some professor of ancient/classical history. The translations came back similar but worded a bit different because there was no way to do a 1 to 1 translation and they provided options for sightly different variants.
Many chatbots are good at this, including Microsoft Copilot and they can answer questions about languages too if you want to understand the structure, such as "which characters mean 'new-type' in 国家新型都市化計画?"
Personally I'm interested in Japanese and Chinese culture and I frequently find Japanese speakers engage with my photos on Bluesky so I frequently use it to read responses and write replies where: (1) I can specify tone and context, and then (2) I use a different chatbot to translate my reply back to English to check that it translates properly.
I thought about that but I guess i defaulted to service dedicated to translating that i am used to. If the ML is so good with these, I wonder why google translate(or microsoft and others) have not implemented them into their existing services...
> It makes no sense to bother individual translators with such a miniscule job
You're not bothering them if you're paying for the job. On your part, all you need to do is to set up a web-based interface that makes it easy and fast for them to log in and add the translations.
Machine-created translations are bad. They've become better over time, but they're still bad. If you've ever tried having your native language butchered in the way that machine-created translations butcher my native language on the daily, you'd understand why. I suspect a lot of the push for machine translations comes from monolingual developers in Silicon Valley.
TL;DR There are services that specialize in translating small phrases / paragraphs. Search tattoo translator services (but vet properly, there are fake ones too)
I found a few services while looking for a proper translator to turn a small phrase into Old Latin. I can't remember the services now (it was long ago) but there are professional translators, historians and college professors who moonlight on these sites doing small translations for a small fee. Some offer bulk translations of small phrases. One of the translators I got was a professor in classical text/literature/language (can't remember exactly) and another was some professor of ancient/classical history. The translations came back similar but worded a bit different because there was no way to do a 1 to 1 translation and they provided options for sightly different variants.
Use chatgpt or deepl. They're much better than Google Translate, especially if you specify the context.
Many chatbots are good at this, including Microsoft Copilot and they can answer questions about languages too if you want to understand the structure, such as "which characters mean 'new-type' in 国家新型都市化計画?"
Personally I'm interested in Japanese and Chinese culture and I frequently find Japanese speakers engage with my photos on Bluesky so I frequently use it to read responses and write replies where: (1) I can specify tone and context, and then (2) I use a different chatbot to translate my reply back to English to check that it translates properly.
I thought about that but I guess i defaulted to service dedicated to translating that i am used to. If the ML is so good with these, I wonder why google translate(or microsoft and others) have not implemented them into their existing services...
> It makes no sense to bother individual translators with such a miniscule job
You're not bothering them if you're paying for the job. On your part, all you need to do is to set up a web-based interface that makes it easy and fast for them to log in and add the translations.
Machine-created translations are bad. They've become better over time, but they're still bad. If you've ever tried having your native language butchered in the way that machine-created translations butcher my native language on the daily, you'd understand why. I suspect a lot of the push for machine translations comes from monolingual developers in Silicon Valley.
I think it does it reasonably well for some major languages. What languages are you referring to here?
Finnish is a good example of a language where online translations tend to be .. subpar.