Published on July 16, 2025 3:33 PM GMT

Context: Considering auto-translating some high value alignment articles, and what to know if there's some pitfall I'm not seeing.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is a pretty good translator. Sure, by default, it's overly literal, doesn't sound very natural, sometimes fails to translate one out of a thousand words etc. But those are pretty easily resolved by prompting. And, like, there are lots of non-English speakers who'd probably like to be told that AI might kill everyone soon. Yeah, maybe informing them isn't that useful, because e.g. the Lithuanian public can't pressure politicians who could actually slow down the AI race. But translation is now very cheap, so what gives? 

 

BTW, this is essentially the prompt I was using. 

Prioritize making the text sound like natural Dutch, as if written natively in Dutch by a skilled science journalist, over maintaining a literal one-to-one correspondence with the original phrasing.