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1. freeho+(OP)[view] [source] 2025-08-27 22:21:28
I had first noticed "meticulous" to be used a lot in translations from chinese. Is it sth about chinese itself (that they use sth a lot for which meticulous is the closest translation), or about some translation software that is possibly biased towards such buzzwords when translating to english?
replies(2): >>ACCoun+N4 >>wink+ji1
2. ACCoun+N4[view] [source] 2025-08-27 23:02:00
>>freeho+(OP)
A lot of those "ESL" patterns are cultural.

It's a mix of a cultural "founder effect" - whoever writes the English textbooks and the dictionaries gets to shape how English is learned in a given country - and also the usage patterns of the source language seeping through. In your case, it's mostly the latter.

Chinese has a common word with a fairly broad meaning, which often gets translated as "meticulous". Both by inexperienced humans and by translation software.

Ironically, a few Chinese LLMs replicate those Chinese patterns when speaking English. They had enough "clean" English in their pre-training datasets to be able to speak English. But LLMs are SFT'd with human-picked "golden" samples and trained with RLHF - using feedback from human evaluators. So Chinese evaluators probably shifted the LLMs towards "English with Chinese ESL influence".

3. wink+ji1[view] [source] 2025-08-28 11:53:57
>>freeho+(OP)
ESL here, not Chinese. I find meticulous to be a perfectly normal word, I think I don't really use it, but I think I read it from time to time, but maybe I just read some sort of publication by a fan of the word? :)

Same for surpass and boast, I think I use "surpass expectations" and I had to think for a moment, I would use 'brag' these days but pretty sure in school I learned boast, which sounds more formal BE to me, but of course I'm just guessing here.

replies(1): >>redwal+8R1
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4. redwal+8R1[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-08-28 15:12:15
>>wink+ji1
They're all perfectly normal words that literate people use. The problem is the typical American struggles to read beyond a fifth grade level and is actively hostile toward more advanced vocabulary, as the country is deeply anti-intellectual overall.

ChatGPT, of course, behaves like its training set...and the majority of that set is professional writers' published works, which would be more likely to use words like that. It's a collision of academic and literary writing styles with the expectations of people who think Harry Potter or the New York Times (which specifically targets a fifth grade level, placing them above other papers) are challenging reads.

replies(1): >>wink+fX3
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5. wink+fX3[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-08-29 07:37:56
>>redwal+8R1
Maybe I skimmed the article and didn't look for specifics enough, because I did not see a bias towards any level of education. But of course I am biased myself, probably using all the fancy words and still making grammatical errors like a fifth grader, and iirc I did not have a native American coworker (aka people with whom I regularly talk and not just write) for 10 years, only other ESLs and some British people.
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