SB Intuitions releases Sarashina free beta; translation test shows natural Japanese but meaning shifts

Sarashina produced the most natural-sounding Japanese, using phrasing like "honko" (this paper) and "urazuiteiru to ketsuronzuketeiru" (concludes that it supports). However, careful comparison with the English original revealed three meaning shifts in Sarashina's output: it rendered a causal relationship as concessive ("despite having no predictive power" instead of "because"), translated a theoretical "should" as a normative "must not," and used "rational approximation" (gōriteki) where "appropriate approximation" (datō na kinji) avoids confusion with the economics term "rational expectations." Claude and Gemini kept closer to the English structure, which the author suggests may reflect intentional faithfulness for research papers.

The author notes Sarashina's chat has character limits requiring text splitting for full papers, and the beta terms state user data may be used for model improvement. The comparison covers one abstract with one translation per model; results may vary by text and field.