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Tried an AI translation tool for a work project and it completely butchered a contract
Last Tuesday I had to send a French contract to a supplier in Quebec. I figured I'd save time and used that new AI translator everyone is talking about. It translated "date de valeur" as "value date" instead of "effective date" and mixed up "sous réserve de" which basically means subject to. The supplier emailed me back confused and I had to redo the whole thing by hand. Cost me 3 hours of work. Has anyone else had AI mess up important documents like this?
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charlieh7416d ago
Last year I was actually one of those people saying AI would replace human translators in a few years. Not anymore after what happened with my sister's medical records. She's a nurse and we were testing an AI tool to translate patient intake forms from Spanish to English for a clinic in Phoenix. The AI changed "alergia a la penicilina" to "penicillin allergy" which is fine but then it translated "dolor en el pecho" as "chest pain" when the context was about a heart condition and it should have been more specific about cardiac-related chest discomfort. My sister flagged it because the doctor almost prescribed something that could have reacted badly. Three hours of rework sounds about right honestly. These tools just don't get the nuance yet especially with legal and medical language where one wrong word means something totally different.
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ray_burns16d ago
Totally feel your pain, @charlieh74's story about medical records is wild and it shows how risky this stuff is. I've learned the hard way that AI just can't handle the specifics of legal or medical language where every single word matters.
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rosepark16d ago
For translating medical or legal stuff, I always tell people to use a human translator first and run the AI after as a double check the other way around. That way you catch the AI's screw-ups instead of having to redo everything from scratch.
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