That's a very good question.
- Yes, I have.
- It was not professional work but a private request from a loved one.
- It was actually their idea.
- And I was very, very sceptical about it at the idea at first and the output all throughout the process.
I have made extensive edits to the original LLM translation, as it got a lot of things wrong. To be honest, it got a lot of the stuff that is unique to the book and that made the book special wrong, both in words, or intent, and I had to correct it. My workflow was literally putting it in the prompt, taking the output, then putting the two texts next to each other and deciding, sentence by sentence, word by word:
- Is the translation any good? (around 95% was generally good, sometimes it trailed off, and I needed to find the point at which it started bullshitting)
- Does it use terms that are unique in the book consistently the right way (it almost never did, I literally had a dictionary of the most frequent mistakes)
- Could I have done it better? Do I know a way to better convey the intent? (this happened quite rarely, as it has done a near word-for-word translation, the biggest problems were idioms that made sense in one language but didn't in another, or misgendered characters)
All in all, I think the LLM did the heavy lifting in remembering all the odd words and grammar, and it gave me a very flawed first draft. It was 80% of the time, but like 5% of the actual creative work that goes into a translation.
I spent 90% of my time outside the LLM, in my text editor.