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One day in the spring, at the hour of an unprecedentedly hot sunset, two citizens appeared in Moscow, at the Patriarch's Ponds. The first of them, dressed in a summer gray pair, was short, well-fed, bald, carried his decent hat with a pie in his hand, and on his well-shaven face were glasses of supernatural size in black horn-rimmed. The second, a broad-shouldered, reddish, swirling young man in a checkered cap twisted at the back of his head, was in a cowboy shirt, chewed white trousers and black slippers.
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Human:
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At the sunset hour of one warm spring day two men were to be seen at Patriarch's Ponds. The first of them--aged about forty, dressed in a greyish summer suit--was short, dark-haired, well-fed and bald. He carried his decorous pork-pie hat by the brim and his neatly shaven face was embellished by black hornrimmed spectacles of preternatural dimensions. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with curly reddish hair and a check cap pushed back to the nape of his neck, was wearing a tartan shirt, chewed white trousers and black sneakers.
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"шляпу пирожком" has been auto-translated to "hat with a pie" - ridiculous and inaccurate AI translation. It is only one of many, many examples.
The example above was from a random book. I knew AI is going to fail.
Perhaps you could qualify your initial statement that we can’t translate literature in a way that isn’t ugly. That would be true. But machine translation is a huge asset every day to people in need of understanding important things in a foreign language. Quite a miracle really.
And this is the reason why I'm not buying "the end of classical Computer Science". AI doesn't work with text very well (reference to your comment "Machine translation works pretty well" - no, it isn't), and often can't even translate/recognize conversations. For example, auto-generated YouTube CCs often suck.
Art is a little bit different, since it's subjective, and artist can say "oh, I just see things this way". Fluctuations in an artwork can be always seen as features, not bugs.
With translations you have to be more precise. The same for Computer Science, you often need to understand nuances to do the precise work.
You're saying "few years", but I've started using auto-translating software at least 15 years ago, maybe even more than that. We had this progress 15 years ago: yes, we were able to auto-translate simple conversations.
It's constantly improving, but at the same time there is no breakthrough, and machine translation still sucks.