Providing Translation Hints for Hackers' Pub Posts

洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) @hongminhee@hackers.pub
Hackers' Pub has separate features for short notes and longer articles. Among these, articles can utilize LLM-based translation functionality, but you might worry about potential mistranslations. Fortunately, there's a way to provide specific translation guidelines to the LLM. While not an official feature, this method leverages Markdown's compatibility with HTML syntax and HTML comments.
You can simply write instructions for the LLM between <!--
and -->
at the very beginning of your article. For example, in the article "Two Approaches to Solving the 'Quiet Fediverse' Problem: Conversation Backfilling Mechanisms", I included the following guidelines for English and Japanese translations:
<!--
For English translators:
- The title should be: Two Approaches to Solving the "Quiet Fediverse" Problem: Conversation Backfilling Mechanisms
- It should be noted that @julian@community.nodebb.org's original article is written in English, and this article summarizes, is supplemented with additional analysis, and translates it to Korean.
日本語翻訳者へのお願い:
- 「연합우주」は韓国でのみ使われる表現ですので「フェディバース」と翻訳してください。
- 「@xxx@yyy.com」のようなメンション構文の前後にはスペースを入れてください。
-->
As shown above, you can manually specify the title or instruct the translator to use specific terminology.
While LLM translation is quite excellent, both human translators and LLMs can still produce mistranslations when context is missing. If the author can directly provide context, it will help avoid mistranslations.