Earlier this week, PCWorld published a roundup of Windows 12 rumors translated from PCWelt that does not meet our editorial standards. We’re deeply embarrassed by it, and I personally apologize that the article was published. It should not have been, but we’re keeping the article live (with an editor’s note at the top) so it remains in the public record.
Windows Central published a response detailing its errors. Thanks for keeping us accountable, guys — genuinely. In the same spirit of accountability, I want to explain how this happened, and what we’re doing to ensure a mistake like this never occurs again.
Let’s start by discussing how PCWorld handles translated articles, and then I’ll dive into the issues with the article itself.
I thought this was a very well written, transparent article that took accountability as seriously as it should. I am still not sure why people are using AI for translation when translation software already existed. People mention that AI is more context aware, but I feel like when you saw those friction points in old translation software it prompted you to look further into the context, whereas AI will just make an executive decision and people feel like it must be right because it’s AI. I guess it’s possible old language software, or even a translator, would have done the same thing, but I still think people would have less inherent trust in the old software alone. I do want to point out that this AI issue was just a small part of the problem and they addressed plenty of other issues and how they plan to remedy those.
This wasn’t even an AI issue nor even a translation issue. They published an article that lacked sources, and still wasn’t good enough once sources were added.
Yea, I mentioned in my comment that there was a confluence of issues, but the article does point out that the AI translation made the statement more definitive.
Edit to add:
i’d translate sollen as should personally but my german is very poor
It depends on contract. Your interpretation matches use as “should”. But there’s also use as “claims x” or “is claimed or said to be” which the quote refers to.
Ich soll - I should or I am asked to. Es soll [sein] - it is supposed to be or it supposedly is.
There is a difference in translating, and interpreting. And interpreting can be difficult even for the best as you need a deep cultural understanding of both parties. Just machine translating articles is an obvious recipe for disaster.
In my experience. Since they mentioned they translate article from the Swedish branch as well. As a Swede. Translation software has never been particularly good at translating Swedish. There is just too much nuance and contextual words for a software to provide reliable translations.
We have lots of words, that have multiple meanings, often very, very different from eachother, based entirely on context.
Any Swede will know what “får får får?” Means. This is a real sentence. Translation software does not understand it one bit, unless it’s been hardcoded in.
Edit: another funny one. “en bar man bar en bar man i en bar” you have 4 “bar” but they mean 3 different things.
Translation is what the transformer architecture was designed for. It is the state of the art, and translation software has been using ML for a long long time.
This feels like an appropriate use of AI, but failure of editing.
Not with general purpose LLMs. They start off ok, but become much more interested in continuing the text they’ve already translated, rather than looking back to what it is they’re meant to translate. So they drift off course as the translation gets longer.
General purpose LLMs’ failure to do a task like translation must be very funny for their investors. Even the more translation-gocused ones seem to have issues.
(ETA I need to edit my comments to federate them?)
That’s very odd. The translations built in to Firefox run on the local device - like a phone, even a dumpy old phone - and they’re pretty okay.
Pre-existing software was also never terribly accurate.