alt Hacker NewsAmusingly I absolutely abhor translations done by people who think the way you do. I want a translation that's as literal as possible and which provides the necessary commentary for me to understand any alien concepts, idioms, customs, etc. I absolutely never want "translated" cultural references. At that point the "translator" is nothing more than a shitty fan fiction author as far as I'm concerned.
Of course the above requires actual work on the part of the consumer. I realize many don't want that, particularly when it comes to entertainment. So I appreciate that the other sort of "translation" exists but I think it's important to realize what exactly those are.
Thankfully LLMs are more or less to the point of providing what I'm after in near real time.
But you aren't disagreeing with your parent comment. You seem to have a strong opinion that you are; that opinion is incorrect.
Words refer to a broad semantic region, a phenomenon technically known as "polysemy".
The range of a word in one language is always different from the range of analogous words in another language. This is a classification problem. And a translator must think about how to solve it. Imagine a Venn diagram with 20 circles that each overlap the other 19 to differing degrees. What does it mean to designate one of those circles as "the literal translation" of a foreign word?