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Earlier quoted context omitted.
To make things even more confusing, “half two” means 2:30 in the UK and Ireland.
Unlike the German and French versions, that doesn't make any sense at all.
For "viertel" (quarter), German itself isn't without its regional ambiguities, though.
There are two different conventions, but I never saw any ambiguity: One convention is "viertel vor zwei" (13.45) / "viertel nach zwei" (14.15), the other convention popular in the east and southwest is "dreiviertel zwei" (13.45) and "viertel drei" (14.15).
To help my fellow English-speakers: "halb zwei" ("half two") is the German idiom for "halfway [between one and] two o'clock" "deux heures et demie" ("two hours and one half") is a much better cognate for the English "half past two o'clock" We're all used to off-by-one and fencepost errors. To be honest, this is probably a less interesting one of Google translate's mistranslations. But it's one that's very mechanical…
To make things even more confusing, “half two” means 2:30 in the UK and Ireland.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unlike the German and French versions, that doesn't make any sense at all.
It's a colloquial contraction of "half past 2". To me, the German makes no sense - half of 2 is 1. Agreed though that the French is the most easily understood internationally.
I've even heard of "three quarters (of) two" in German, which means 1:45.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unlike the German and French versions, that doesn't make any sense at all.
It's a colloquial contraction of "half past 2". To me, the German makes no sense - half of 2 is 1. Agreed though that the French is the most easily understood internationally.
There are actually regions that use terms like "dreiviertel zwei" (three fourths of two) to indicate 01:45 and "viertel zwei" (one fourth of two) to indicate 01:15. Especially the latter confuses people from other parts of Germany, because regular high German uses the terms "viertel vor zwei" (a quarter to two) and "viertel nach zwei" (a quarter past two).
Interestingly it does do the Dutch "half twee" correctly, to French and back. Moreover, halb zwei is translated to half twee and back normally. So there is no inter-dependency or translation "via English" or something.
i hate this kind of time communicating in austria there is "viertel zwei" - quarter two which in one part of austria (vienna) means 1:15pm (or 1:15am), in the other half (90% of austria) it is understood as 1:45pm (or 1:45am), sometimes as 2:15pm (or 2:15am) - but never as 1:15pm/am "viertel [vor/nach] zwei" - quarter [to/after] two. the [] are optional.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To make things even more confusing, “half two” means 2:30 in the UK and Ireland.
Maybe this sounds weird, I have no idea if it has any basis in fact, but I have noticed when you ask Google to translate between two non-English languages, it sometimes introduces errors that an English speaker would make. I've therefore wondered if they somehow, either deliberately or indirectly through some model, translate to English as an intermediate step.
http://daily.unitedlanguagegroup.com/stories/editorials/goog...
“…a multilingual NMT model trained with Portuguese>English and English>Spanish examples can generate reasonable translation for Portuguese>Spanish although it has not seen any data for that language pair. We show that the quality of zero shot language pairs can easily be improved with little additional data of the language pair in question,” the paper states.
Do other cultures do that?
Also, google gets "fuenf vor halb drei" wrong but "fuenf vor halb zwei" correct, it seems pretty random. "Fuenf nach halb eins" is 1:35 instead of 12:35 and "fuenf nach halb drei" is 5:30 instead of 2:35!
i hate this kind of time communicating in austria there is "viertel zwei" - quarter two which in one part of austria (vienna) means 1:15pm (or 1:15am), in the other half (90% of austria) it is understood as 1:45pm (or 1:45am), sometimes as 2:15pm (or 2:15am) - but never as 1:15pm/am "viertel [vor/nach] zwei" - quarter [to/after] two. the [] are optional.
Wait, why does "viertel zwei" mean 1:15? What's "viertel eins"?