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Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

isgooglefixed.tw

61–70 of 229 posts

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#61

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'…

In "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" show, they take a popular song, translate to some language and translate back, and have the guest sing the massacred version. Search for "jimmy fallon google translate"

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#62

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…

> Google could allow one to select the writing system

I'm not sure their models have a concept of writing systems. I noticed that neither Google Translate nor DeepL understand the equivalence of katakana and hiragana in Japanese. Probably every character is just an independent token to them.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#63
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…

Chinese generally has two writing systems: traditional and simplified. In the 1950s to 1980s mainland China developed simplified chinese in a bid to make the language easier to write. Note that these are just different ways of writing the same characters: think cursive versus block. They are not different languages -- the vocabulary and grammar can be identical.

Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and to one degree or another in various Chinese immigrant communities around the world. Taiwan is obviously the 800 pound gorilla here.

Taiwan has come to develop its own style of written Chinese -- think US vs British English but more nationalistic. So the question is: when Google Translate converts to traditional characters should it also be translating into Taiwan's written patois [not to be confused with the Taiwanese dialect]? After all, Google Translate does not differentiate between Britain and the US in English (it sadly uses British). And there are other groups which use traditional without this patois (Hong Kong, say, though likely not for long), albeit in fewer numbers.

The author does have one really good point, and that is that Google Translate is mistakenly describing traditional as zh-TW, that is "traditional as used in Taiwan". As long as it insists on doing that, it should also be translating into Taiwan's written patois. But what it should be doing instead is describing traditional as zh-Hant.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#64
post #42

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'…

maybe the word is a homonym in one language, but isn't in the other languages don't have a strict bijective mapping between them

I wish there were tools for diagramming out sentences like this in languages you don't understand. I'm sure it wouldn't help much for understanding the meaning, but it'd be nice to get an exact/terse explanation of its structure.

That, or a naive approach that attempts to map everything to mad-libs style sentences. See also; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#65
post #21
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That can make sense when you're coming from a tiny side road onto a major busy highway.

It doesn't make sense to delay thousands of cars on the highway by 30 seconds so that one car can cross it a few minutes faster. Better to make that one car wait 10 mins (and perhaps by now it is a queue of 3 cars), and save 30 seconds * thousands on the main road.

Other countries normally build bridges or highway merges to avoid this problem.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#66

Isn't ChatGPT better than Google translate or deepl? Why doesn't google use a modern LLM to translate?

ChatGPT is a transformer model. Google pioneered transformer models specifically for translation.

If ChatGPT outperforms google translate, I'd guess it's simply because chatGPT is a bigger model with more training data.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#67
post #53
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 direc…

But they could easily be using a larger dataset on line? Which goes two ways: maybe this line of reasoning doesn't mean anything; or well yes exactly, but why so small online when they have all this space and also offer Bard.

They don't charge anywhere near enough to do that, I'd imagine; and likely couldn't at the scale they operate at (I mean, they are even embedded into many apps to help instantly translate banal things like comments). Imagine trying to translate a long news article with a sequence of max-length LLM inferences.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#68

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

It currently supports exactly 4 non-European languages. It won't be a proper Google Translate alternative until it supports at least 3x as many languages.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#69
post #58
post #5

Taiwanese here. I have a mixed opinion about this site. Some of them are just weird: - mega → 巨型 (百萬) Really? Do you really want to translate mega to 百萬 (million) in every context? *Edit: every, not any - text → 文本 (文字) Seriously? 文本 is the formal, academic way to say it, even in Taiwan. Have this person never been any academic environment? - through → 通過 (透過) Seriously???

Honest question, why haven't china moved to a western (?) alphabet based writing? With my ignorant knowledge, it seems crazy that you are using that way of writing today. Using 24 letter combinations vs memorizing 3000 (min) to 20.000 icons! When I was a kid, my best friend was chinese, and we could never do anything on saturdays because he had to go to a school to learn chines, and how to write in chinese was very h…

Because people like being able to read texts that already exist, so switching to a different writing system is usually a downgrade.

(Also, learning to write English probably consumed more of your time than just a Saturday per week.)

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#70
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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».

And even if it is representing a moment of time, it may not be representing exactly sixty seconds. It could in fact be an idiom representing an indeterminate longer interval:

This particular usage has been around, colloquially, for a minute.

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