We’re making translations of a lot of EA content into Russian and have an experience that might be relevant to countries where people mostly can’t speak English.
We learned that you need introspective people to evaluate or do the translations.
The best professional translators in our language are mostly hired by large publishing houses and have long-term commitments for many books to come (and the publishing houses aren’t able to lease them for our projects).
Surprisingly, looking at a translation that looks like a good text in our language but has significant mistakes, most people wouldn’t notice the mistakes. Most people who aren’t the best professional translators don’t actively try to recognize what exactly they just read. When a translation expresses something really different from what the original text conveys, but the words are similar enough, people just don’t notice it.
Google Translate was better at not making mistakes than 80% of translators that sent us a translated test segment. We ended up hiring two translators from the EA/LW community.
A lot of the 80,000 Hours’ articles are highly optimized for conveying a correct understanding, and translation errors might significantly reduce the value of the texts.
We’re making translations of a lot of EA content into Russian and have an experience that might be relevant to countries where people mostly can’t speak English.
We learned that you need introspective people to evaluate or do the translations.
The best professional translators in our language are mostly hired by large publishing houses and have long-term commitments for many books to come (and the publishing houses aren’t able to lease them for our projects).
Surprisingly, looking at a translation that looks like a good text in our language but has significant mistakes, most people wouldn’t notice the mistakes. Most people who aren’t the best professional translators don’t actively try to recognize what exactly they just read. When a translation expresses something really different from what the original text conveys, but the words are similar enough, people just don’t notice it.
Google Translate was better at not making mistakes than 80% of translators that sent us a translated test segment. We ended up hiring two translators from the EA/LW community.
A lot of the 80,000 Hours’ articles are highly optimized for conveying a correct understanding, and translation errors might significantly reduce the value of the texts.