Forums » Newbie Central » Read Thread

is it possible to use ai to translation purposes? i'm not good enought in english to write an entire story, but i would love to use the site to create story games. is this possible or should i write in my own language? this isn't clear in this post, so i'm wandering how should i approach the issue. thanks in advance!

There are various translation tools that don't use AI so I'd recommend using those if you really want to translate something, but if you can't double check the translation yourself it might be a better idea to work in your native language.

i can write and read in english for communication purposes, but my literacy skills are quite useless because of grammar or literary knowledge in english. do you have a tool to suggest? it'll be much appreciated!

     I think you're English is pretty good, the only issue that's really bugging me is that you have no capitalization.

It's just my laziness, sorry! Of course, I wouldn't write a proper story this way, I supposed since this is a kind of "informal thread", I typed stuff like that. But thanks for the tip!

     No problem. So you can capitalize, which is good to know.

tbf though, using "you're" instead of "your" when one is critiquing someone else's grammar is a bit ironic.

   Oh frick, my bad >< I don't usually do that.

I agree that you have good english for communication purposes, the fact that you can string together a coherent sentence already puts you above some noobs who visited in the past, but please, learn some simple capitalization rules. I'll start you off with two main things to keep in mind:
 

1. Capitalize after a period. (The little dots after a sentence: ".")
2. Capitalize all names. (e.g.: Bob, Sally, Sue, New York, Earth, etc.)

Yes, noted! I do that while writing properly; I'm not THAT newbie! LOL I also know that "I" should be capitlized all the times (at least, this is what I've learned thousand years ago in my english class during middle school) ^ - ^"

     That's true, and I'm starting to see a few examples of your grammar errors. (unrelated to the Is)

Yes, I know... I usually say my English sucks, but my Brazilian Portuguese is, in fact, really good compared to other native speakers/writers...

Yeah, just saying.

     I don't think there's an issue with translating with AI, but you have to understand first that translations aren't perfect. You may even misunderstand this from the translation. I doubt there's any word that you can translate perfectly and correctly into another language, (except between extremely similar languages like English and Spanish I guess) and a big part of writing is the meaning behind words which can get easily lost or garbled by AI translation.

     Also, it's ok to write in your native language, just might not be read by as many people as it would be in English but again, trying to translate can really mess your story up.

i might be able to check the translation and meaning, but the text wouldn't sound polished enough. btw, i'm brazilian, but i can't speak spanish even speaking english! lol shame on me... i'm really affraid of this "messing up translation thing", and i was planning to write the most i can in english, and use ai to correct mistyping, grammar and expressions. what do you suggest?

     I think AI is good for mistyping, and perhaps grammar, but I'm not so sure if it'd be good for expressions. The best suggestion I can go with is write in whatever language you're best at, if you want to use tools I sadly do not have any experience with translation tools as I've only written in languages I'm fluent in before.

I would advise against using AI for translation purposes, as it struggles enough with grammar whenever "talking" to you. You could probably find a translation tool that doesn't feed everything through AI somewhere, or even get a friend who's fluent in it to help you. Another option is to just write it in your native language, if you want to.

In simple words, in case you didn't understand that, or the translator you used had trouble properly translating it:

I would not; instead, find a good translator with no AI, get a friend to help, or write it in your language

Thank you all for the tips! I'll start writing in my own language then, and later I can try something else! Thank you so much!

Any translation system that doesn't involve humans is AI. Not all translation systems are languague models (those that are not, mostly suck), but AI is a much broader term.

But I don't think there is an issue with using language models for translation if you tell it to "translate close to the original and conserve the tone, style, voice and nuances of the narration as a professional literary translater would". In the publishing industry translations are well established, and we wouldn't debate authorship of a translated work. Even machine translations are now fairly common in professional publishing, so it would feel weird if this site had a higher standard.

Obviously, don't use AI for creative writing---the results are just not good.

Edit: I use gemini pro, most of the time when I need to write in German (often multiple time a day), and most of the time it does a fairly good job.

That's true. Heck, if the Akinator was made today, it would be called AI, lol

Ah, I'm aware of the result one can get using AI for creative writing. I was testing a roleplay pluggin from one of the available AIs, and it wasn't what I would expect from a "real creative writing". And I like my own style, TBH. A person's style reflects they own voice, AI style usually have a different tone and mood. It just doesn't sound "right".

Definitely. Also, when you said "they own voice," did you mean their own voice?

Yes! This is a "lack-of-attention" error! LOL
Edit: in my mind, I was saying THEIR "out loud", but... :T

Your English is better than the English of some of the native born English speakers we get around here. If you don't think your vocabulary is quite up to creative writing, well this is a great place to practice and learn. In fact I doubt you'd ever improve much by just depending on an automatic translation.

If you're not ready to commit to a full storygame yet you could post an except in the Writing Shop for feedback, or a regular short story in the Creative Corner any time.

In the Help section, there are a few articles by Gower on sentence structure that might be useful to you too.