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Google translates German “halb zwei” to French “deux heures et demie”: 1h off

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Re: Google translates German “halb zwei” to French “deux heures et demie”: 1h off

#51

Post by tom_mellior »

franze wrote: post #26

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.

Where in Austria does "viertel zwei" mean 2:15? My impression was that the places that don't use the Eastern ("Viennese", if you will) system always explicitly use "viertel vor" or "viertel nach" (or "viertel über"), leaving nothing optional/implicit.

Re: Google translates German “halb zwei” to French “deux heures et demie”: 1h off

#53

Post by ArmandGrillet »

nraynaud wrote: post #43

you had to be better at school! (in France, the good students are sent to learn German as a third language, and the bad ones are sent to learn Spanish as a third language, knowing German is a marker of class)

I have studied in France and this is not true from my experience. Greek and Latin were and will be for the good students (Hollande removed that but it'll be back).

The choice between German and Spanish is made by the parents except if there is a lack of German teachers.

Re: Google translates German “halb zwei” to French “deux heures et demie”: 1h off

#54

Post by rvense »

daveguy wrote: post #15
LyndsySimon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Halb zwei" is "half two". It means "1:30".

Ahh and it's being translated to 2:30. Stark evidence that Google translate doesn't really "understand" anything yet.

I don't think anyone would claim that it does, except maybe Google Marketing and a few blue-eyed computational linguists - who would probably do themselves a favour by focusing a little more on the linguistics of the endeavour.

It is a text-to-text machine translation system. There is, as far as I know, no attempt at an internal representation of anything like semantics or knowledge about the world. They may have added some grammatical facts, but there is no model of the world and no notion of time like a person would use to make or understand statements in natural language.

Case in point: The artifacts of the training processes behind machine translation systems like Google Translate cannot be used to generate sentences from pictures or notions or anything like that. What is happening is nothing like a human learning a language, or even a pair of languages.

That's not to say it's not impressive, useful and important tech, mind, but it really does not do all of what it appears to do at first glance.

Re: Google translates German “halb zwei” to French “deux heures et demie”: 1h off

#55

Post by asveikau »

bwasti wrote: post #38
asveikau wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You may be spot on :) 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 q…

This is a weird thing because you'd be hard pressed to find two languages as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, and whatever this paper has to say on the topic it'd be inevitable that the English translation in the middle would be "lossy".

I sometimes get disappointed when people suggest that machine translation is a substitute for actually learning the languages. It's true that we have limited time in our lives to study languages, and the machine translations can be a quicker way to get the gist, or possibly open some doors. But go much beyond that, like claims I sometimes see that you can wear AR goggles and suddenly communicate like a native, and you set unreasonable expectations. Or perhaps imagine a world where the way to read Shakespeare is to put it through a machine and it tells you, "statistically, Shakespeare meant to say this". Is that really reading it?

Re: Google translates German “halb zwei” to French “deux heures et demie”: 1h off

#57

Post by hardlianotion »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #41
p49k wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make things even more confusing, “half two” means 2:30 in the UK and Ireland.

And this is very likely the reason for the mistake. See, Google Translate seems to take a shortcut to translating between language A and B, by translating from A to English and English to B. For instance, for the last five years or so I've been seeing GT translate the Greek word for "swallow", the bird, to the French word for "to swallow", the verb [1]. In Greek and French, the two words have nothing in common (Greek…

That reminds me of this famous work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_As_She_Is_Spoke

Re: Google translates German “halb zwei” to French “deux heures et demie”: 1h off

#58

Post by Symbiote »

gpvos wrote: post #45
elthran wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And one problem is that no-one on the European continent learns that at school or hears that on TV. I got quite confused when I recently started to travel to the UK and Ireland a bit more often.

The difference between English and German, and later the difference between English and Danish, was emphasized when I was learning the two languages.

Almost all Danish people know that "halv to" is "half one".

Re: Google translates German “halb zwei” to French “deux heures et demie”: 1h off

#59

Post by pjmlp »

asveikau wrote: post #55
bwasti wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be spot on :) 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 q…

This is a weird thing because you'd be hard pressed to find two languages as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, and whatever this paper has to say on the topic it'd be inevitable that the English translation in the middle would be "lossy". I sometimes get disappointed when people suggest that machine translation is a substitute for actually learning the languages. It's true that we have limited time in our lives to s…

Actually there are quite a few, if you include the variants spoken across the peninsula, Galician, Mirandese and Aragon are even closer to Portuguese than Spanish. :)

Re: Google translates German “halb zwei” to French “deux heures et demie”: 1h off

#60

Post by pjmlp »

bwasti wrote: post #38
asveikau wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You may be spot on :) 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 q…

As native Portuguese, my biggest beef with Google translate is that it cannot make heads or tails from Portuguese variants when translating.

Same applies to other non-English languages, like Spanish and French, not sure how much this affects English variants as well.

Most of the time one gets a translation that isn't fully correct from the point of view of how the language is actually used in a specific country, sort of mixing American and British English on the same sentence.

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