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deanctoday at 7:06 AM4 repliesview on HN

Maybe the author is a non-native English speaker, and this enables him to communicate things he's not able to do himself. Should OSS maintainers start hiring professional translators? Are you going to fund that?

We really should stop jumping to conclusions and shaming people for using these tools just because you don't like the language of the LLM. How is a non native speaker meant to determine what is English slop and what isn't?

I should also note, I am a native speaker. There's absolutely nothing wrong with what's written in the part you chose to paraphrase, and it makes sense to me.


Replies

flohofwoetoday at 7:28 AM

A non-native speaker most likely writes more 'understandable' English than the weird convoluted Claude style.

FWIW though, you can ask an LLM to write in 'Simplified Technical English' (see: https://www.asd-ste100.org/), which at times reads like its written for a child, but it is much better for inclusion of non-native speakers.

raincoletoday at 7:21 AM

> Should OSS maintainers start hiring professional translators?

The world existed before 2022.

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fredrikholmtoday at 7:14 AM

This is a recent degradation; they've been writing blog entries for years.

As a non native English speaker I can also attest to this trade being extremely demanding of English fluency:

> public static void DoTheThing(Configuration config)

Isn't something you can not understand and still function as a software engineer. Yes, some schools and universities teach in other languages, but the entire ecosystem from code to documentation to articles is nearly almost always in English.

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veidrtoday at 7:14 AM

Ditto. I've started to wonder if the real problem with many of these complaints about LLM writing is actually reading comprehension.