How to use Copilot/ChatGPT/whatever AI as translator for Factorio wiki

[Tertius]

Unfortunatly, i cannot evaluate wether or not this is proper german langage due to my ignorance of the german langage. I can however tell that "Schiene" and "Gleis" are different words, and since it is the title of the article, it's not a good start. I suppose a richer glossary would have some value, and i suggest using the game's locale file, which you can find in the game's folder, with a bit of editing or maybe using another AI you can get a curated list fairly fast.

The translation and handling of markup is very good, only minimal editing afterwards required. Good except for "Gleis", which should be "Schiene", and as you already found out it's a thing to add to the glossary. That's what the glossary is for, and that's a regular task during translation and nothing special. In the past I used Deepl, and Deepl also has a glossary, but only 10 entries in the free version, so it's tedious to constantly swap in required entries and removing not required entries. Adding the whole game terminology to the AI glossary would be overkill, so I add stuff if I see there's some terminology not translated correctly.

However even when done "right" AI-only translation are currently far from the quality of human translation also done "right", which i believe is the case of the on the wiki, judging from french/english translations. It has a certain style of expression, that an AI could typically mimick, but it would end up doing a lot of non-sense that a human would need to curate. I feel this is the main point.

My point is that I as translator have a choice between two alternatives. Either spend a huge amount of time and provide a few selected articles in "human translated" quality and the vast majority of articles still untranslated. Or spend the same amount of time to get every article translated but with a slightly mechanical touch.

I went with the second option. I wanted to enable German people who cannot cope with English using the Factorio wiki. These people don't want perfectly worded articles, they want to understand the game! And I gave them this understanding. I got the whole German part of the wiki translated. A machine translator enabled me to translate 10 articles within an hour or two. This went on for about a year (I had too much time on my hands).
I cannot judge how good the French articles are and if they are machine translated or not, but German is translated very good and very natural by current machine translators.
Something not possible if I tried to do that manually. I started the whole thing by translating manually, but my own translations ended up with clumsy and really badly worded text that was clearly visible as "translated from English". Another hour and it would be good. One hour and more for just 1 article.

This would also mean burning out after a few articles. We see many wiki editors with just a few translated articles - they started with good intentions but burnt out fast. And I got the job done for 1.1. I'd like to do that for Space Age as well, but I don't have too much time on my hands any more.

And really, the machine translated text is so good, it's rarely required to edit significantly. It's not the robotic mess from 20 years ago any more. The most work goes into fixing up the wiki markup.

[coffee-factorio]

A machine translator enabled me to translate 10 articles within an hour or two. This went on for about a year (I had too much time on my hands).
...
Something not possible if I tried to do that manually. I started the whole thing by translating manually, but my own translations ended up with clumsy and really badly worded text that was clearly visible as "translated from English". Another hour and it would be good. One hour and more for just 1 article.

It's real and it's true.

I was tempted to lead with a carpenter and a tablesaw. A dog is much, much cuter than a tablesaw. You won't find a carpenter without a tablesaw though.

My follow up was from a company that localizes things with AI professionally. It's been their job to localize things since 2017.

I have a concern because they indicated something slightly different than you have.

What you've said about this thing not learning, is there a specific hook or flag to turn that off? I know there is a local version, I presume it has a terminal command or a configuration script that prevents this? Online you lose that control, but presumably a corporation like google has something set up.

If there is no such thing... the wise thing is to find a friend that speaks English and German. That would be continuing with caution I think.

There's got to be someone who can in Germany or all the internet. And if you get them playing Factorio for a minute I think they'll get it. At worst, add someone to your friend list.

As for whether or not it ever got me anything meaningful. It got me a good grade and several won games of scrabble on my way to my Bachelors Degree. And it continues to give me some lovely images of... furniture. Yes. I'm looking at furniture. Beautiful drawers. You can say I've kept abreast of AI's developments and don't want it to go away. I know a carpenter. I can see how many fingers he has, know he's good.

[Shulmeister]

I was tempted to lead with a carpenter and a tablesaw. A dog is much, much cuter than a tablesaw. You won't find a carpenter without a tablesaw though.

Sounds like someone who walk on a rake, and take it in the face.