While workers worldwide ponder how artificial intelligence might affect their livelihoods, there’s one sector where that question is no longer hypothetical. Machine translation has reduced the amount of work available to human translators and interpreters, and depressed their earnings.
Microslop’s own tools and documentation struggle to produce high-quality translations in places. They translate shit like keywords and function names in their docs.
Example: The German version of the T-SQL documentation for REPLACE literally translates the name of the function in the header: ERSETZEN. At least it’s a verb describing the activity, unlike the page for the UPDATE statement which translates it into a noun (AKTUALISIERUNG) rather than the verb (AKTUALISIEREN). Bonus: the description for the arguments also proceeds to translate some keywords. Go ahead and see if you can spot them, you don’t even need to be particularly familiar with SQL or German.
It’s a prime example of the computer following instructions without understanding the context, but since the instructions are poorly given and the output never checked, it produces uncritically published slop.
Microslop’s own tools and documentation struggle to produce high-quality translations in places. They translate shit like keywords and function names in their docs.
Example: The German version of the T-SQL documentation for
REPLACEliterally translates the name of the function in the header: ERSETZEN. At least it’s a verb describing the activity, unlike the page for theUPDATEstatement which translates it into a noun (AKTUALISIERUNG) rather than the verb (AKTUALISIEREN). Bonus: the description for the arguments also proceeds to translate some keywords. Go ahead and see if you can spot them, you don’t even need to be particularly familiar with SQL or German.It’s a prime example of the computer following instructions without understanding the context, but since the instructions are poorly given and the output never checked, it produces uncritically published slop.
Microslop.