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Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

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Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#111

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

jakub_g wrote: post #61
liendolucas wrote: post #36

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"

Google Translate sings: "You've Got a Friend in Me" https://youtu.be/yh1I57uleYY

This is a whole channel with exclusively Google Translate songs and creative content, folks.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#112

Post by darkwater »

lucubratory wrote: post #97
darkwater wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, but you can read a word you never came across (in a language were the Latin alphabet mapping is actually sane, like Italian or Spanish) by just knowing a few pronunciation rules, that depends on the language. Clearly English is not a good example for this, I know.

The same is true in Mandarin Chinese, to some extent. A native speaker or someone who speaks the language very well can deduce a lot about a word's possible meaning and pronunciation from its component radicals. There are less of them per character than the average English word has letters, but a similar system exists where a Chinese person who comes across a new word in a paragraph will have a lot of context clues t…

That I didn't know and it's actually fascinating! Can you point me to some resource that explains this with some examples, for people who cannot read Mandarin Chinese? TIA!

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#113

Post by afiori »

zirgs wrote: post #99
The_Colonel wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar reason why US hasn't switched from imperial units, just way bigger. The current system works, replacing it would be a massive multi-decade long change with a lot of opposition. Cultural pride/arrogance plays a big role. It's not inconceivable to think that the Chinese regime might fall in the process if it tried to pull it off. Given all these, the benefits just don't outweigh the costs/risks, at least in t…

If you want to write Chinese text on a computer - you still have to use Latin alphabet, because it's not possible to put thousands of characters on a keyboard. So a different writing system for Chinese has already been developed. Some other languages also have more than one writing system. (Serbian and Azeri). When mobile phones became accessible to the general public then many people used Latin alphabet to write in…

The fact that you can write Chinese in Pinyin does not mean that Pinyin would be a good writing system between humans.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#114

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

Be careful when you don't speak the target language and you run something significant through a machine translation. The results can often surprise you and your audience.

I wrote a speech in English, and had Google Translate it to Spanish. This was around 2010. One of the lines was "There is electricity in the air." The translation read, "No hay electricidad en el aire." I speak Spanish well, and upon proofreading, I freaked out that it would negate the sense of the whole sentence, but it can, and it did.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#115

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#116

Post by quanloh »

kwanbix wrote: post #58
raincole wrote: 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…

Information density: Writing takes awhile, but reading them is super efficient, a short line of words can replace a small paragraph in alphabet based writing. For us Chinese reader, could never "appreciate" the character limits then-twitter, our language is so dense that 12 Chinese character(which occupy 24 single spaced characters) can describe a full event, what can alphabet based writing do with 24?

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#117

Post by eptcyka »

kwanbix wrote: post #91
eptcyka wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the US still using the imperial system? I'm not sure if you're aware, but asking why an ethnos/nation hasn't significantly changed their language/culture to appease someone who finds it difficult to grasp comes across as incredibly rude.

I am not asking for me. I never interact with Chinese writing, so it is not my problem, I am asking for them, as I imagine that learning a minimum of 3000 icons would take a lot of time. Computers struggle with Chinese writing (or at least last time I talked with my friend he had this keyboards where they had hundreds of combinations). I found that believing that a person trying to understand something and asking a r…

But you can make the same argument for any non-englisb language today - any language is more difficult to use than English when it comes to computers. For the general case, if your friend was living in China, it'd be the norm, there wouldn't be any Saturday classes. The diaspora has to make do. Moreover, in China, it is the norm, they do not perceive their writing as being problematically difficult, they've made do with it for some years now and it works in China.

I do want to stress that any language that is old enough will eventually contort into a state where the writing is lagging behind the spoken language as it develops faster, and eventually lots of room for optimization starts to appear, lots of legacy to remove. As the culture develops and the spoken language simplifies and words get added, ambiguity seeps in, rudimentary language construcs start to appear unfamiliar to the commmon speaker. The vocabulary now consists of a large mix of old and new, with some redundancy and barbarisms thrown in for good measure. And now, there's lots of room for improvement. And sometimes a nation (or its authorities) decides that its time to simplify things, as mainland China and Sweden and others have done. I wish someone did this with English, bit since there's a multiplicity of English speaking countries, there will never be a meaningful overhaul that doesn't turn into a massive mess.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#118

Post by globular-toast »

SeanLuke wrote: post #63
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…

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…

> Google Translate does not differentiate between Britain and the US in English (it sadly uses British).

Wrong way around? I just checked and it seems to use American (sadly).

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#119

Post by 4cao »

kwanbix wrote: post #58
raincole wrote: 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 it's part of the cultural heritage. Very much like the weird spelling of many English words is.

In particular, the phonetics of Mandarin Chinese underwent several waves of simplification to the point that many characters are pronounced pretty much the same - in particular, there are a lot of syllables pronounced /yi/ or /shi/.

So, transition to a purely alphabetic writing system would mean losing access to all the sophisticated texts of culture. There is even a poem illustrating that phenomenon, and taking it to the extreme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

More practically, everyone learns their first language as a child, and at that point does not get to decide whether something is too "crazy" to learn or not, since nobody asks their opinion.

Further simplification was attempted at some point by the Communists (also as a means to increase adult literacy) but they rolled it back quickly.

Also, it's not 20,000 "icons" to learn. There are a couple of hundred composing elements ("radicals," although it's not entirely correct to call all of them this), which just repeat themselves in different arrangements, and there are some rules to it. Beyond these, only a hundred or so characters have purely unique elements.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#120

Post by hewlett »

junon wrote: post #80
Aachen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

... The exact point being that Taiwan by and large does not use simplified Chinese. They are different countries. They speak effectively different languages.

effectively different languages? no, both the mainland and Taiwan both speak Mandarin, although with distinctive slang and accents. I grew up learning simplified and I can guess a lot of traditional characters reasonably well, although I hear going from traditional -> simplified is much harder
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