Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.
@Gargron argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.
For many of us, translation is first about access.
The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.
@Gargron notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.
There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.
I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.
The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.
@fastfinge@hongminhee This cultural selectiveness is why I am for a constructed auxiliary language as lingua franca. The most popular is Esperanto, but there are technically better projects nowadays.
@patricus@hongminhee@clv1 It also doesn't solve any of the problems of "just learn English": can you afford the lessons? Do you have the cognitive ability to learn two languages? Do you have the time for the lessons? Are teachers and materials available? Are they accessible? Do you have a place to practice outside of the classroom? Also, "let's erase everyone's culture" doesn't sound, to me, like any better of an answer than "let's make one culture king".
I speak as someone who studied French for eight years straight, an hour a day, and never managed to pass a single course. There are people who just literally can't, when it comes to language learning. I'm one of them. Though to be fair, it's almost certainly a combination of the environment, the instruction, and other factors, rather than some flaw innate to me. But either way, I've never found a method that works.
I actually toyed with learning Korean, thinking that maybe it was the gendered nature of French, as well as the spelling, that was the problem. Plus I thought a more regular alphabet might help me. But after eight years of bashing my head against the French wall, I just...couldn't. Picking up a new language course felt like going back to hell, and I couldn't make myself stick with it for more than a week.
@fastfinge@patricus@hongminhee Auxiliary languages are constructed to be easier on purpose. A regular alphabet is only one of many features that must be easy on a lingua franca, and there isn't a single natural language whose all features are easy. As for cognitive ability, as far as I've observed, it seems that the teaching method counts a lot. Have you tried different methods?
@clv1@hongminhee@patricus Yup! With French, I tried: * in-person classroom instruction (both in school and extra-curricular): material is often inaccessible, teachers are mixed quality, I eventually lag behind everyone else in the room and get left behind * total emersion (I live in Canada and have extended family that doesn't speak English): I never manage to take anything in, and just freeze up when addressed directly * independent correspondence courses: materials are more accessible and I can go at my own pace, but no matter how I study, I can't pass the tests or use what I've tried to learn in real life * apps (duolingo): accessibility varies. I eventually get pretty good at doing the exercises offered in the app, but that never generalizes in a way that lets me pass any formal tests or use the language
My measures of success are: * able to have basic conversations in the language * able to pass Canadian government tests to be certified in the language for career purposes
I have never achieved either of the above. And after eight years of failures, I've pretty much given up.
@hongminhee@clv1@patricus I actually did seriously consider some sort of genetic problem. My grandmother (on my father's side) was a French speaker who had the exact same problems learning English. She took dozens of courses over her life, but never actually learned anything. And yet, both me and my grandmother have won awards for writing in our native languages, and had our writing published. My aunts and uncles are all bilingual, but none of my cousins on that side of the family are: they either speak only French or only English, just like me. So that's a strong pattern. On the other hand, the idea of a genetic inability to learn a second language just seems silly. Why wouldn't it make it harder to learn a first language?
