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Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

isgooglefixed.tw

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Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#21

Post by pests »

komali2 wrote: post #13
sfmike wrote: post #3

google maps also in taiwan made me ride on the highway on a motorbike which isn't allowed and got a nice ticket for following googles directions even with avoid highways enabled.

Google maps is particularly useless in this sense. I desperately wish they'd open source it so local could just add features as needed. In Taiwan, we don't have "highway," "motorcycle roads," etc, as Google understands it (with its notoriously difficult to activate "motorcycle route option"). There's specific rules that should be just implemented by name, flags like "no flower road," "no highspeed highway (red plate…

Are you really waiting up to almost 10 minutes at a light?

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#22

Post by sgt »

MarcusE1W wrote: post #6

I think DeepL is considered to be quite good for translations nowadays https://www.deepl.com/translator

Seems better but it's definitely easy to spot when something has been machine translated, even when using DeepL. Did a test now and if you translate from English into a target language, the corresponding text is definitely not the way a native speaker would formulate it.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#23

Post by ben_w »

raincole wrote: post #12
Sniffnoy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really? Do you really want to translate mega to 百萬 (million) in any context? Would its use as a metric prefix not be a correct context for this?

My point is this site doesn't provide any context. It's very weird to say "mega should be translated to 兆/百萬/超級/巨型" without specifying the context first. A Reddit "megathread" is definitely not a 百萬討論串. *Edit: my word choice was wrong in the parent comment. I meant to say "every context", not "any context".

Literal translations often have that problem, and even human translators need context.

The initial comment looked like there wasn't any context, which means "mega" could just as easily mean «SI million prefix» as «huge».

In written English, the word "minute" in isolation and without context may be the noun for the time period of 60 seconds, or it may be the adjective «very small».

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#24

Post by junon »

Aachen wrote: post #15

> A lot of times the translation would sound like how Chinese is used in China instead. Ignorant person here (sorry if I'm asking a dumb question), but given the larger population of China to Taiwan, why is that not the correct thing to do? Or is this "Traditional Chinese" a language spoken only in Taiwan? When translating to Dutch, I wouldn't expect it to output Dutch as it is spoken in Belgium, Suriname, or Limburg…

> given the larger population of China to Taiwan

Taiwan is its own country. India has a similar population to China. Why not just translate into Urdu or Tamil instead, by that logic?

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#25

Post by Aachen »

raincole wrote: post #18
Aachen wrote: post #15

> A lot of times the translation would sound like how Chinese is used in China instead. Ignorant person here (sorry if I'm asking a dumb question), but given the larger population of China to Taiwan, why is that not the correct thing to do? Or is this "Traditional Chinese" a language spoken only in Taiwan? When translating to Dutch, I wouldn't expect it to output Dutch as it is spoken in Belgium, Suriname, or Limburg…

> Or is this "traditional Chinese" a language spoken It's not a spoken language. It's only for written text. > only in Taiwan? Only in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and oversea Taiwanese/HK communities.

Thanks. So essentially the site is saying that Google Translate outputs what I'd call (for simplicity) Taiwanese/Hong Hongese with a foreigner's "accent" (but in writing)? It sounds odd to me. If China doesn't speak Traditional Chinese, why would GTranslate output text with China's usage patterns

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#26

Post by komali2 »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #16

This is an interesting issue. Simplified and Traditional are different (but closely related) writing systems that can be used to express the exact same text. They are not different linguistic variants of Chinese. It looks like regardless of which writing system you choose, Google still translates into the most widely used variant of Chinese: Standard Chinese, as spoken on the mainland. It just writes the result using…

To clarify, "Standard Chinese" is the English term to describe the official language of the PRC. There is no country called "mainland," nor is there a country called "mainland China," nor is there a language that can be accurately called "Chinese."

It's much more clear in Mandarin itself, such as 官話. Note that some might translate this as "Traditional Chinese," separate from the typical meaning, when trying to separate "simplified characters" from "traditional characters." In English it's all a mess.

Also, you can write guanhua or beifanghua or "Standard Chinese" in both Simplified and Traditional charactersets. They are almost 1:1. You also used to be able to write Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, and other languages in Traditional Chinese characters.

That's why we should be careful to separate Guanhua ("Standard Chinese") from Taiwanese Mandarin and etc. imo using the word "Chinese" in the descriptor just sows further confusion and in fact furthers the political goals of the CPC to cast a political blanket over all things even remotely descriptive as "Chinese," be they language, culture, race, heritage, or nationality.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#27

Post by rjzzleep »

Aachen wrote: post #15

> A lot of times the translation would sound like how Chinese is used in China instead. Ignorant person here (sorry if I'm asking a dumb question), but given the larger population of China to Taiwan, why is that not the correct thing to do? Or is this "Traditional Chinese" a language spoken only in Taiwan? When translating to Dutch, I wouldn't expect it to output Dutch as it is spoken in Belgium, Suriname, or Limburg…

I don't think the downvotes are fully justified and I think it's a valid point to make. Taiwan itself for example for the longest time had an extremely unintuitive local pinyin version. They are at least no longer as strict in enforcing it versus the now official one that came from the Mainland. It is sometimes the cause for going the wrong place in Uber trips.

However, it is worth noting that there was basically an iron curtain between China and Taiwan for a long time after Chiang Kai-shek went there. A lot of IT terminology for example developed separately in Taiwan and China, so a lot of technical terms are different. The following website lets you look up scientific terms and convert them between china mainland and taiwenese.

https://terms.naer.edu.tw/

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#28

Post by Tistron »

eric_khun wrote: post #14

I now use chatGPT for translating english to traditional Chinese and give me some variations. Definitely works better than Google translate. For example for "I want to build a good gym routine": 我想建立一個良好的健身計畫。 Wǒ xiǎng jiànlì yīgè liánghǎo de jiànshēn jìhuà. Here are some variations of the sentence along with their English translations: 我想制定一套有效的健身計劃。 Wǒ xiǎng zhìdìng yī tào yǒuxiào de jiànshēn jìhuà. I want to creat…

I also do this with translations between Swedish, Danish and English.

I find it fascinating that chatGPT is better at translating (a lot better) than a tool specifically built for it, when (if I understand correctly) chatGPT was in no way designed to translate, and is only in some way predicting text, one word at a time.

How come google hasn't leveraged better existing tech to make the translations better? Is it too computationally expensive?

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#29

Post by DeathArrow »

>Google Translate has not been accurately translating into Traditional Chinese (as used in Taiwan) for a while now. A lot of times the translation would sound like how Chinese is used in China instead.

Isn't Taiwan a part of China, though? I am not trying to justify Google not caring about Traditional Chinese as used in Taiwan. I am merely commenting as the author's view of China and Taiwan as two different entities while almost all countries don't recognize Taiwan as a separate entity.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#30

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

Aachen wrote: post #15

> A lot of times the translation would sound like how Chinese is used in China instead. Ignorant person here (sorry if I'm asking a dumb question), but given the larger population of China to Taiwan, why is that not the correct thing to do? Or is this "Traditional Chinese" a language spoken only in Taiwan? When translating to Dutch, I wouldn't expect it to output Dutch as it is spoken in Belgium, Suriname, or Limburg…

"Traditional characters" and "Simplified characters" are writing systems, not languages. You can write many variants of Chinese with either system.

Traditional characters are still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, while simplified characters are standard on the mainland and in Singapore. However, traditional characters are still used in some niche cases on the mainland (such as decorations, names of shops and restaurants).

Whether a translation to "Traditional characters" should default to Taiwanese-flavored Mandarin is an open question.

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