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Lost in Translation
Guest: Archie McKenzie of General Translation
The public has been fascinated by the experience of interacting with large language models, or LLMs, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Inaccuracies, called hallucinations, continue to appear in LLM output. Some lawyers, among others, continue to use these outputs without verifying their accuracy. Doing so damages their work product and reputations.
In this episode we will be looking at current work with LLMs that plays to their strengths and involves a lower risk of inaccurate outputs. In particular we will look at the use of LLMs to translate between languages.
Software teams generally operate in their native "natural" language. Once they have finished building their system, they often want to make it available in other languages to access other markets. The process of making a program that was originally written for one language usable by people who speak other languages is called internationalization. Historically internationalization has been a slow and expensive process.
In this episode we talk with Archie McKenzie, the founder of a Silicon Valley startup that is offering internationalization services to software teams. Archie is atypical in various ways. A Briton, Archie came to the US to study Classics at Princeton. He ventured into a course taught by a famous computer scientist, Brian Kernighan, whose teaching inspired Archie to switch from Ancient Greek and Latin to Python, Typescript, and Computer Science. One of Archie's student projects, a web site called histories.ai foreshadowed his current startup. Histories.ai offers the ancient Greek text of Herodotus's Histories, long out of copyright, and pairs it with LLM-generated translations.
After graduating from Princeton in 2024, Archie started a company called General Translation to develop and commercialize internationalization automation for software development projects.
Full disclosure: One of our hosts, Marc Donner, is an investor in General Translation.
Recorded: 2025-06-02
To stream this episode from most podcasting platforms, search for the ABA podcast "To the extent that ..."
To Read Further
https://histories.ai - Archie McKenzie's undergraduate project providing translations of passages from Herodotus's Histories.
https://generaltranslation.com/ - Archie McKenzie's startup.
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