I'm writing this in English.

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isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said.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.

This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.

@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.

From back when I used to flip through a thick dictionary, taking a minute for each sentence, to now, when I use an LLM to write in English, people don't realize that I'm personally speaking to them in English for their sake. Honestly, I just want to speak in Korean. I hate English.

@hongminhee Criticisms of Anglophonic hegemony are similar to (and inseparable from) criticisms of capitalism.

In many cases, systems people put in place to mitigate capitalism's harms inadvertently strengthen capitalism's grip (e.g. tax credits for low paid workers allow them to be paid even less).

Similarly, lowering the bar for communication in English, as you describe, makes it ever less likely that we'll ever start treating non English speakers as first class citizens.

@gargron

@hongminhee @Gargron Coincidentally, I've been enjoying a YouTube series by a couple of women who escaped North Korea and settled in South Korea in their late teens.

Their English is pretty rudimentary, so they use AI translation (presumably LLM-based, written and vocal) to communicate with their (mostly American) audience. The degree of cultural interchange has been wonderful and illuminating and my world as a monolingual person would be smaller and less-informed without it.

@hongminhee I had engaged with the thread you link to on a very superficial level, only regarding the poetry and cultural nuance that is missed (and I think I must have logged off before it was finished).

I appreciate the time and care you've taken to make the case for the equity and access problems that machine translation might ammend. You're right, of course. If LLMs stick around (and don't bring about a world-ending situation), I hope their use is focused on extending access and increasing cross-cultural and cross-language information exchange. Whether they can reverse the flow of information so that it's not just English-->others, relies on us Anglophones doing a better job than we're doing right now at making space for the rest of the world.

It is absolutely a bias and equity issue that I "got to" think about it so superficially in the first place.

@hongminhee @Gargron
I would like to add one point that I rarely see addressed: a translation is also a responsability, that the text provided is faithful to the original, possibly imperfect, but faithful.

If it is provided to you, at your request, them it's a contract between you and your provider. You might say that automatic translation is better than nothing.

But if it is imposed on you, as in subtitles, then you have no other choice but them and the responsability is on the provider. In this case, automatic translation will essentially not be admissible.

@hongminhee

I'm writing this in English.

Do you, though? Your writing style was different in the past, so I am pretty sure that you now machine-translate, or perhaps use an LLM writing assistant.

To be honest, the non-slop version of you was much better.

@hongminhee @grumpy4n6 @Gargron Attn @jfk . This might interest you.

@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.

@hongminhee@hollo.social I think your post makes me think more critically about the use of LLMs for translation services. It is easy for me to judge from a position of privilege because I am a native English speaker, and I do not realize the access I am given simply because of it.

While reading your post it also made me think about the sacrifices you made to contribute to this community. There are precious few people in the Asia-Pacific region who regularly contribute to AP development, and a large part of that is the language barrier.

If LLM-translation makes the AP development community less euro-america-centric, then I am all for it. Cultural differences we can work through, but language barriers are harder to bypass!

Aside, congratulations for making it onto Hacker News front page

@hongminhee oh, i feel this so much

@hongminhee @Gargron Thank you for your thoughtful and well-articulated thoughts in this thread. Machine translation has given me access to my family and cultural heritage in a way I didn't have before, and I read Rochko's post the same way.

@hongminhee is there evidence that LLMs are superior to special purpose machine translation models? In my subjective experience the quality of google translate has gone down recently (but I don't know what tech they are using behind the scenes - I think it's likely they shifted to LLM translation but cannot prove it); apart from that I suspect that since LLM training data is largely untagged for translation this would degrade quality vs. purpose built models.