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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2025

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  • I’m a country coordinator for a SMART Recovery country other than the US.

    This is highly unlikely, but I will check this out.

    I find the idea that SMART would sell your data highly unlikely. SMART is privacy focused. Nick names are encouraged, you can enter zoom meetings with camera and mic silenced. SMART definitely does not collect personal data, only attendance numbers for internal statistics. SMART accepts donations from recovery organizations, but does not have any obligations towards them.

    As I said, I will follow up.

    Much of IT is subcontracted, so there may be the origin, and it will be looked into.

    BTW, SMART’s Financials are public. You are free to check if there is income from selling your data.





  • Not really our case. We do English->Spanish, where we try to achieve the most neutral Spanish, as there are many local variations. Think truck/lorry, for example. It’s more translating expressions or phrases that don’t convey the same concept. For example, “by the way” could be translated to “por el camino” which doesn’t usually have the same usage.




  • What most people managing translations don’t get is that they are essentially using the tools that translators use, but skipping the value adding step.

    I’ve been doing translation as a side gig for years. Lately I’ve been doing some translations for an NGO that deals with addiction management, of which I’m part.

    The materials have a lot of nuances, and need the translator to understand them, to properly convey the concepts.

    The usual process for translation is to feed the original to a machine language translation software, and then work with both versions side by side, in a translation management software, tools that make editing and proofing faster and easier by a human, to achieve the best result.

    Last time, someone in the organization, mono lingual, decided to do a handbook translation with ChatGPT, or something like that. They then gave the result to a colleague and me.

    The resulting translation was exactly what we expected.

    A problem was that some bilingual people were shown the results, and reported that the results were amazing, without realizing that they were commenting on the wow factor, not on the accuracy of the result, especially because they had not done a critical side by side comparison.

    My colleague and I did the editing work, were paid less, but the end result was the usual translation quality.

    The commissioning person at the org boasted that AI translation was great, obviating our work, to get their brownie points.

    TLDR: translation has used machine translation as a first step for a long time, with results edited and polished by humans. Ignorant decision makers are skipping that crucial step, getting sub-par results, oblivious to the fact.





  • Creativity, intuition, “big picture” thinking, global context thinking, empathy and subtle understanding, like teachers understanding a child’s context and adapting the pedagogical approach, or translators grasping concepts, nuances, feeling, will not be replaced soon.

    Remember, these are statistical models, nowhere near intelligence. A huge part of intelligence is understanding and decision making with very little data. That inference processing is very far away.