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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

#81

Post by vidarh »

rconti wrote: post #63
p49k wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does it? "Half two" would certainly not be common in the US, but certainly folks are familiar with "quarter of 2" which would mean 1:45. If you told me it's "half two" I would assume it means 1:30, not 2:30, as a native (american) English speaker -- although I have taken a couple quarters of German in college so perhaps the German is sneaking in a little bit?

As a Norwegian I was also used to the German variation and it took me a long time to get used to the UK version, but yes, in the UK "half two" is unambiguously always half past two.

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

#82

Post by rconti »

wccrawford wrote: post #70
rconti wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? "Half two" would certainly not be common in the US, but certainly folks are familiar with "quarter of 2" which would mean 1:45. If you told me it's "half two" I would assume it means 1:30, not 2:30, as a native (american) English speaker -- although I have taken a couple quarters of German in college so perhaps the German is sneaking in a little bit?

As a native (American) English speaker, "half two" is nonsense to me, but if I had to guess at a time the closest thing would be "half past two" (2:30), so I'd probably guess that first. I'd never heard anyone say "half until two" or "half to two" and they're both incredibly awkward. "quarter after", "half past", and "quarter til" are the ones we use.

"quarter til" is definitely far more common, but I've heard "quarter of" on occasion as well.

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

#83

Post by wibr »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #47
wibr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For DeepL: -> À trois heures et demie -> 14 h 30 du soir, -> À 14 h 30, -> On va au cinéma à 14h30. Correct for everything but the first, not sure why it added "du soir". For the a complete sentence "Um halb drei gehen wir." it's also correct ("On part à 14h30.").

As far as I can tell it's _in_correct in every instance except the first: À trois heures et demie = À trois heures et demie Aller à deux heures et demie =\= 14 h 30 du soir [1] A quatre heures et demie nous partons =\= À 14 h 30 [2] A trois heures et demie nous allons au cinéma. =\= On va au cinéma à 14h30 [3] [1] misses the "to go" part and also gets the time of day wrong- which is important because it uses 24-hour…

I was only referring to the time. "halb drei" is two thirty, which usually means 14:30 unless you specifically say "in the morning". The action in [2] would probably be added if you add a full stop.

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

#84

Post by vidarh »

Symbiote wrote: post #58
gpvos wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Maybe it's an age thing and that it's relatively new in the UK - I certainly never hear about it when I learned English in Norway from the mid 80's onwards.

Some searches also seems to support that this is something that at least did not become common until the 80's or 90's in the UK, and it makes sense that schools various places would lag behind.

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

#85

Post by vidarh »

hrydgard wrote: post #61
zwieback wrote: post #39

Germans like to reference time relative to the half hour, e.g. "fuenf vor halb drei" for 2:25 or even "zehn vor halb drei" for 2:20, etc. 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!

Swedish does it but only the five before/after half case, not 10. And generally no other number than five actually. Examples: "Fem över halv två (13:35)" or "fem i halv fyra (15:25)".

Norwegian too. Though other numbers than 5 but rarely more than 5 tends to be acceptable. E.g. "tre på halv fire" (15:27) works, but it's rare to use it to be more precise than with five. If you want to be that precise people are more likely to resort to saying the specific minute of the hour ("tre tjuesju" or "tre syv og tyve"; the latter is "old fashioned" and from Danish but still frequently used), alternatively with 15 instead of 3 if even remotely ambiguous.

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

#86

Post by wyldfire »

rconti wrote: post #82
wccrawford wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native (American) English speaker, "half two" is nonsense to me, but if I had to guess at a time the closest thing would be "half past two" (2:30), so I'd probably guess that first. I'd never heard anyone say "half until two" or "half to two" and they're both incredibly awkward. "quarter after", "half past", and "quarter til" are the ones we use.

"quarter til" is definitely far more common, but I've heard "quarter of" on occasion as well.

I've heard "quarter of" but I always felt like it sounded ambiguous.

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

#87

Post by Symbiote »

vidarh wrote: post #84
Symbiote wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Maybe it's an age thing and that it's relatively new in the UK - I certainly never hear about it when I learned English in Norway from the mid 80's onwards. Some searches also seems to support that this is something that at least did not become common until the 80's or 90's in the UK, and it makes sense that schools various places would lag behind.

The Oxford English Dictionary [1, university/library subscription needed] gives the definition "In stating the time of day, etc. = half an hour past the hour named." and a quotation from 1791:

> "a1791 F. Grose Olio (1796) 107 C. Pray what's o' clock? W. It will be half ten."

But until looking this up myself, I hadn't realised Americans and Australians always included the "past". Was your teacher British?

--

Assuming you have some familiarity with Danish numbers, you might like another definition: "half, preceded or followed by an ordinal numeral, was formerly used to express a half-unit less than the corresponding cardinal numeral; thus Old English þridda healf, Middle English thridde half or half thrid = two and a half. Obsolete."

Example (c1200 Ormulum (Burchfield transcript) l. 13777) "Þatt sahh. & herrde daȝȝwhammliȝ. Hallf ferþe ȝer þe laferrd" so hallf ferþe means 3½, "halvfjerde".

[1] http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/83402

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

#88

Post by nailer »

wyldfire wrote: post #9

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…

> ("half two") is the German idiom for "halfway [between one and] two o'clock"

You may find 'half to two' easier to remember.

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

#89

Post by asveikau »

pjmlp wrote: post #80
asveikau wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I was aware of some of those, not trying to defame the good people of Galicia or anything, just trying to say that Iberian Romance languages are all pretty similar, and notwithstanding many exceptions the probability of easily finding nearly 1-to-1 translations of any given text is much higher than for English where you would inevitably lose more information in transit.

I got the point, was just trying to be a bit funny. I imagine there are other languages around the world that share the same kind of similarities among themselves.

My wife is Russian, and things she says about how Ukrainian sounds to her reminds me a lot of what Spanish speakers say about Portuguese. I don't know enough to say how similar that comparison is, but it passes the "neighboring regions that might have been more mutually intelligible 1000 years ago" test.

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

#90

Post by PeterisP »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #73
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surely Google have a French–German pairing, though? There must be lots of works available in both languages.

It's plausible that French-English dataset is an order of magnitude larger, mostly due to Canada's bilinguality causing a large trove of parallel data.
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