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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2493 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've actually spent about 4 hours yesterday using Gemini 1206 to translate as I go, the 2 million token CW meant I can throw in dozens of chapters and have it produce perfectly pleasant text. There are a few stylistic quirks, or perhaps they were the original translator's quirks that aren't present anymore. It certainly doesn't garble gender and do anything too funky.

I'm sure Claude would be great at the task, but even the original GPT-4 would consider it trivial.

Here's the site I've been grabbing the raw text from if you want to take a look: https://www.piaotia.com/html/7/7095/6107291.html

The horrid "official" translation can be found on:

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html

Can you give us a small sample of the better translation for comparison?

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2770-splitting-the-road-with-one-slash.html

That's the bad translation.

Here's a better one on pastebin:

https://pastebin.com/b4R2hWF7

The most obvious changes are that it very sensibly decides that "Land of Sin" is a better translation than "Naughty Land". A character doesn't mysteriously turn male partway through.

"Manjusaka", a type of plant with connections to the underworld, is a far more contextually and culturally appropriate translation for a location as opposed to "Red Spider Lily".

While a matter of taste, "Covenant Alliance" seems more elegant than "Sanctuary Alliance", and is what human translators initially opted for.

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html

Wow you weren't kidding about that translation quality. And yeah probably any recent LLM can do it, but that 2M context limit is pretty sweet when you need it.

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