Just browsing random links as you do, I wondered what else Hiramoto Yasei has written. Amazon showed me the amazingly named Particular The 1 Bitch Owner Course, Hand beaten Win. I suspect that's not the actual title. From the sample pages, it seems to be a collection of joseki/fuseki problems.

This is typical of what I get if I throw Chinese or Japanese language go sites or pictures of books through Google Translate. With all the hysteria about AI mastering everything, and with automatic translation between European languages getting pretty good now, why is Chinese or Japanese to English not better than this?

I think that is the translation provided by Amazon Japan. If you change the language to Japanese and use the translation in Chrome or go to Google Translate, then the result looks somewhat reasonable.


I found this title funny Particular Zuckerberg's 4 ...

If you look at the URLs you'll find these translations in them as well.

I think the issue at the center is that translations really aren't all the same. Translating half a page of online news isn't quite the same as translating book titles or what users might throw at each other on 2ch.

Two sentences that are completely different to us can be very similar for the machine. In particular short messages often have an element of people just knowing what is being said (or thinking that they do). The machine translation doesn't have the same context as we have and sometimes ends up changing the context completely (in our eyes). This is of course not the only error they can make and presumably they have good accuracy when averaged over many inputs even if they can fail badly on specific inputs. Basically, it is that they will always give you a translation, even when they can't.

One issue with automatic translation of text about go is that many of the technical words also have non-technical meanings, and unless the translator is aware of the domain, it will tend to use the non-technical meaning of the word. If you have ever seen an automatic translation talk about "robbery" instead of ko, you know what I mean.

I translate Chinese go books by telling an LLM, before I start, "I am going to ask you to translate some Chinese text accompanying weiqi diagrams. Your translations should be idiomatic and not shy away from Go jargon." I sometimes have to nudge its subsequent translations in the right direction, but in general it seems to do an excellent job.