Caveat: The remaining thing to watch out for is that some LLMs are not -by default- prompted to translate accurately due to (indeed) hallucination and summarization tendencies.
* Check a given LLM with language-pairs you are familiar with before you commit to using one in situations you are less familiar with.
* always proof-read if you are at all able to!
Ultimately you should be responsible for your own posts.
(while AFAICT Google hasn't explicitly said so, it's almost certainly also powered by an autoregressive transformer model, just like ChatGPT)
The objective of that model, however, is quite different to that of an LLM.
It occasionally messes up, but not by hallucinating, usually grammar salad because what I put into it was somewhat ambiguous. It’s also terrible with genders in Romance languages, but then that is a nightmare for humans too.
Palmada palmada bot.
The big difference? I could easily prompt the LLM with “i’d like to translate the following into language X. For context this is a reply to their email on topic Y, and Z is a female.”
Doing even a tiny bit of prompting will easily get you better results than google translate. Some languages have words with multiple meanings and the context of the sentence/topic is crucial. So is gender in many languages! You can’t provide any hints like that to google translate, especially if you are starting with an un-gendered language like English.
I do still use google translate though. When my phone is offline, or translating very long text. LLM’s perform poorly with larger context windows.