How do you translate “dim sum”? Many English speakers would find the question strange, knowing the term refers to the large array of small dishes that accompanies a Cantonese-style brunch—and so doesn’t need translation.
But words like “dim sum” are a challenge for developers like Jacky Chan, who launched a Cantonese large language model last year through his startup Votee. It might be obvious to a human translator what words are loanwords and which need direct translation. Yet it’s less intuitive for machines.
