Gemini Pro is now good at Slovak
I have already posted about why LLMs are now preferable for translations. Back then, I recommended Claude for translations to Slovak. Now the best Slovak-speaking model seems to be Gemini Pro 2.5.
Why use LLMs for translations?
I have already covered this in my previous article on this topic, but let's briefly summarize and update reasoning from that article:
- Fluency: LLMs are now far superior to specialized translation services. They have high language comprehension and fluency. Specialized translation models will never catch up.
- Steerability: Where there are multiple approaches to translation, LLMs can be told to use the style you prefer. And they can be given specific terminology to use.
- Code: LLMs are smart enough to recognize code (URLs, XML/HTML, Markdown, etc.) and refrain from translating it.
- Knowledge: LLMs have extensive knowledge, which helps them preserve all meaning of the text.
What happened to Claude?
Claude Sonnet 3.5 was very good at Slovak, but Sonnet 4 is terrible at it. What happened? Claude is very popular among software developers, myself included. That's millions of customers willing to pay dozens to hundreds of euros monthly. My guess is that Anthropic optimized Claude 4 for software development use cases at the cost of other LLM applications, because that's where most of the demand is at the moment.
Gemini Pro 2.5 is the new translation king
Gemini models have been around for some time, but 2.5 release is a major step-up. Gemini is not as good at software development as Claude, but to my delight, it turned out to be really good at writing fluent Slovak. I am now assigning it all translation tasks.
How to use it
I am using Gemini API, but if you do not have API access, you can just select Gemini Pro in the free Gemini chat app. I have a rather long system prompt for translations. Aside from basic instructions, it mostly covers translation of technical terminology, stylistic details, and it encourages loose translation for better readability. If you are using the chat app, just paste your instructions above the text that you want translated.
Previously, I used to ask ChatGPT and Claude for two translation drafts each (four drafts total) and then for alternative translations for select phrases. With Gemini Pro, the translation is so good that I only ask for a single draft and then proofread it top-down to fix remaining issues.