Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

isgooglefixed.tw

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 229 posts

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#31

Post by Aachen »

junon wrote: post #24
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?

Please read the rest of the comment. I was assuming that what is called "Traditional Chinese" is used in China, based on its name (Chinese) and that GTranslate outputs it. Urdu and Tamil aren't spoken in China and isn't what GTranslate outputs when you select a Chinese language, afaik

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#32

Post by RGBCube »

DeathArrow wrote: post #29

>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…

+300 social credit!

And no, Taiwan is not a part of China (China says it is, but that's China...).

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#33

Post by SargeDebian »

DeathArrow wrote: post #29

>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…

Whatever your standpoint on that, the site proceeds to explain there is a specific locale that suggests a Taiwan-specific translation as opposed to one that is commonly used on the mainland, but it does actually result in something that is used in Taiwan.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#34

Post by raincole »

Aachen wrote: post #25
raincole wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> 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.

Taiwanese is another language... but let's use your simplified terms for now. Well, yes, pretty much this. It's not that different from writting "fish and chips" as "fish and fries" in British English.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#36

Post by liendolucas »

One funny thing that I found not long ago is that you can traverse a long chain of word translations by re-feeding the translated word. You start with a word let's say in italian, get it translated to spanish. Now you grab that word in spanish and translate back it to italian. You do sometimes a get a different word. You do this again and again. There doesn't seem be a one to one correspondence in certain cases. Don't know if this a known issue nor if some else already spot it.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#37

Post by Aachen »

rjzzleep wrote: post #27
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…

Based on a sibling comment from raincole, Traditional Chinese isn't used in China at all. Shouldn't the translator then simply output the Taiwanese (and, according to them, Hong Kongese) variants when selecting that language, rather than the language having two possible words to use?

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#38

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

junon wrote: post #24
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?

I don't think your point is relevant here.

They speak the same language in China and Taiwan: Mandarin Chinese. The question is whether to use more Taiwanese-sounding phrases when traditional characters are requested.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#39

Post by josephg »

Tistron wrote: post #28
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…

The Google translate offline translation datasets are absolutely tiny - like, 20mb in size for French. Obviously this is heavily quantised and so on, but it’s not that surprising that a 30-60+ billion parameter language model outcompetes Google translate handily.

I assume you’re right - that Google translate hasn’t been updated to take advantage of much bigger, more computationally complex models. I suppose for direct translation it’s probably not needed, but being able to ask chatgpt to explain the translation (and any cultural nuances involved) is a game changer when you’re trying to learn a language.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#40

Post by Y_Y »

Aachen wrote: post #31
junon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Please read the rest of the comment. I was assuming that what is called "Traditional Chinese" is used in China, based on its name (Chinese) and that GTranslate outputs it. Urdu and Tamil aren't spoken in China and isn't what GTranslate outputs when you select a Chinese language, afaik

Bear in mind that Taiwan (the country) also calls itself China, and so did the rest of the world until the seventies.
Post reply on HN