Some additional things that translators do (which I recall from a professional translator friend, put in my own words):
* Idioms (The article mentions in passing that this isn't so much a difficulty in Norwegian->English, but of course idioms usually don't translate as sentences)
* Cultural references (From arts, history, cuisine, etc. You don't necessarily substitute, but you might have to hint if it has relevant connotations that would be missed.)
* Cultural values (What does "freedom" mean to this one nation, or "passion" to this other, or "resilience" to another, and does that influence translation)
* Matching actor in dubbing (Sometimes the translation you'd use for a line of a dialogue in a book doesn't fit the duration and speaking movements of an actor in a movie, so the translator changes the language to fit better.)
* Artful prose. (AFAICT, LLMs really can't touch this, unless they're directly plagiarizing the right artful bit)
* Idioms (The article mentions in passing that this isn't so much a difficulty in Norwegian->English, but of course idioms usually don't translate as sentences)
* Cultural references (From arts, history, cuisine, etc. You don't necessarily substitute, but you might have to hint if it has relevant connotations that would be missed.)
* Cultural values (What does "freedom" mean to this one nation, or "passion" to this other, or "resilience" to another, and does that influence translation)
* Matching actor in dubbing (Sometimes the translation you'd use for a line of a dialogue in a book doesn't fit the duration and speaking movements of an actor in a movie, so the translator changes the language to fit better.)
* Artful prose. (AFAICT, LLMs really can't touch this, unless they're directly plagiarizing the right artful bit)