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Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

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Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#121

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

komali2 wrote: post #100
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mainland is a well established concept when talking about China. "Standard Chinese," "Mandarin Chinese," or however you want to call it (there are several terms in Chinese itself that refer to essentially the same thing) is the official language both on the mainland and in Taiwan. They have slightly different variants, but both standards grew out of the same historical movement to standardize Chinese. Both the Re…

> both on the mainland and in Taiwan This is an accident of history and a quirk of the English translation. Though the official language in English is described as "Standard Chinese," in Mandarin it's written as 國語, which just means "national language." The National Language described is Taiwanese Mandarin, 華語, which translates in English usually as Mandarin Language. By some measures it's very similar but it's diffe…

> This is an accident of history and a quirk of the English translation.

It's not an accident of history. The Nationalists and the Communists had many similar influences (e.g., Sun Yat-Sen is revered by both). One of the ideas they shared in common was the idea of creating a national language. The PRC basically adopted the standardized form of Chinese developed by the ROC.

> Give it another 40 years or so and the languages will be quite distinct

I'm not so sure about this, given the amount of cultural interchange across the strait. Speaking in a more Taiwanese way is actually quite popular in mainland China, where it's considered cute.

> There is no country on earth called The Mainland

I'm not going to get into the entire nationalist dispute here. "The Mainland" marks out a well defined geographic area that's not quite synonymous with the PRC.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#122

Post by jan_Inkepa »

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…

>If you want to write Chinese text on a computer - you still have to use Latin alphabet,

Non-native Chinese-Script language learner - I use touchpad stroke-input on my macbook 50% of the time (and touchscreen stroke input on phone 100% of the time).

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#123

Post by yorwba »

darkwater wrote: post #112
lucubratory wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#124

Post by consilient »

goblin89 wrote: post #89
Aachen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Be on the lookout for misinformation obscuring the fact that Cantonese (a.k.a. Yue), spoken in Hong Kong, is a language . It’s not mutually intelligible with Mandarin (unlike, say, Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, which is more or less Mandarin with a different accent and slightly different vocabulary) or other languages of Chinese family. Cantonese uses different transliteration systems as well (Pinyin doesn’t work for it…

> Who’s mainly responsible for there to this day being no ISO standard for transliterating Cantonese (like Pinyin), and its conspicuous absence from Google Translate (despite having 86 million speakers—consider that Translate supports, say, Welsh, Basque, Dhivehi, and many others that are spoken by fewer than even one million), is probably obvious.

There's no ISO standard because there's no actual standard. Even just within Hong Kong there are multiple systems in use.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#125

Post by goblin89 »

zarzavat wrote: post #57
komali2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incorrect per the language code they're using, zh-tw. They obviously side with the CPC on political issues, but that's a separate issue, they should just change the code to the more accurate "zh-Hant." zh-tw exists to specifically identify Taiwanese Mandarin, which is a defined separate dialect (we really should stop using "Chinese" as a word to describe the various flavors of Mandarin, let alone including entir…

Google does not use a language code in the UI. They describe the language as “Chinese (Traditional)”, which could mean anything. The URL contains a language code, but that’s just an internal implementation detail.

Google should rid itself of the notion that “Traditional Chinese” and “Simplified Chinese” are anything but complete misnomers if you’re talking about languages. They are scripts, and scripts don’t have a 1:1 mapping to languages.

Imagine a world in which Google Translate has one entry called “Latin” for anything using Latin script (Welsh, Irish, you name it) and another entry “Simplified Latin” for English. Just like that, translation “from TC to TC” (e.g., Cantonese to Hakka) is very much a thing!

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#126

Post by raincole »

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…

I'm pretty sure that your friend couldn't do anything with you on Sat was a parenting issue, not a language issue...

If he juse had used Spanish, he would have been learning piano or something on Saturday.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#127

Post by carschno »

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???

Not related to the issue raised in the article, but using a translation tool for individual words is going to give you the wrong answer in many situations by definition. The meaning of a word depends on its context.

For translating a single word, a dictionary that lists all possible meanings in the target language is the right tool. A translator (human or algorithm) can only guess or give you the list of possible translations. Google Translate has come up with a suitable proxy solution by adding the "More Translations" pane.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#128

Post by goblin89 »

consilient wrote: post #124
goblin89 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be on the lookout for misinformation obscuring the fact that Cantonese (a.k.a. Yue), spoken in Hong Kong, is a language . It’s not mutually intelligible with Mandarin (unlike, say, Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, which is more or less Mandarin with a different accent and slightly different vocabulary) or other languages of Chinese family. Cantonese uses different transliteration systems as well (Pinyin doesn’t work for it…

> Who’s mainly responsible for there to this day being no ISO standard for transliterating Cantonese (like Pinyin), and its conspicuous absence from Google Translate (despite having 86 million speakers—consider that Translate supports, say, Welsh, Basque, Dhivehi, and many others that are spoken by fewer than even one million), is probably obvious. There's no ISO standard because there's no actual standard. Even just…

Let’s not mix cause and effect. There are multiple systems because there’s no standard, and there’s no standard because there’s strong opposing interest. Cantonese-speaking world would strictly benefit from this standardisation, lack of it impedes business and takes away from language’s legitimacy.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were attempts to introduce a standardised way of romanising Yue, but certain groups with many votes considered this national interest as they try to maintain authority across a very diverse set of people speaking different languages.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#129

Post by j7ake »

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…

Chinese writing is not phonetic, while a western alphabet would necessarily be phonetic.

One may think that is a disadvantage for Chinese, but since there such a wide variety of spoken Chinese languages, Chinese writing acts as a unifying framework across different spoken languages.

This allows a (more or less, ignoring traditional and simplified) common script for one billion people.

So a person in Taiwan can reasonably read a newspaper in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. But that same person would probably have trouble speaking Cantonese with Hong Kongers.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#130

Post by nicolas_t »

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…

One thing to note though is that this is easier with traditional Chinese characters than with simplified characters because part of the simplification was often removing components of a character or simplifying them so that they no longer have an obvious meaning.

The simplification did make it easier to write by hand (which is becoming less and less relevant with computers) but doesn't necessarily make it easier to learn new characters because of this.

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