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Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

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Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#161

Post by Aachen »

naniwaduni wrote: post #152
Aachen wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do people living in Taiwan call the 'other' China? Is "mainland China" a correct thing to say, or is the word "main" there implying that Taiwan is lesser and not an equal/peer state? I used the word China in other comments because I didn't know what to call it otherwise, hoping that in the context of Taiwan it is clear what I mean

"Mainland" means "continental" in general; the other context it comes up in is "mainland Europe". The term is ... not completely uncontentious in its own right, but mostly on the "assumes the other China is another China" dimension.

I'm not sure what the last part means about the other China being another China, but continental sounds like a good alternative actually. No concept of main versus spare/alternate/lesser, just not an island

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#162

Post by goblin89 »

oefrha wrote: post #155
goblin89 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

This is not a Latin situation at all, it’s similar to British English vs American English. I just checked and Google Translate doesn’t have separate Englishes for American, British, Australian, New Zealand, Scottish, Indian, etc.

Your comment would be true if American and British English were linguistically classified as distinct, mutually unintelligible languages (beyond amusing accent jokes).

A Mandarin speaker in Taiwan has a different accent and slightly different vocabulary than Mandarin speaker in Beijing, but neither of them would be able to converse with a Yue speaker any more than a Russian speaker would be able to converse with a Polish speaker.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#163

Post by jefftk »

zirgs wrote: post #160
jefftk wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And speech to text!

Speech to text is very impractical and error-prone.

Talking to a Chinese-speaking coworker, my understanding had been that speech to text was very popular in China, especially on phones?

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#164

Post by oefrha »

goblin89 wrote: post #162
oefrha wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a Latin situation at all, it’s similar to British English vs American English. I just checked and Google Translate doesn’t have separate Englishes for American, British, Australian, New Zealand, Scottish, Indian, etc.

Your comment would be true if American and British English were linguistically classified as distinct, mutually unintelligible languages (beyond amusing accent jokes). A Mandarin speaker in Taiwan has a different accent and slightly different vocabulary than Mandarin speaker in Beijing, but neither of them would be able to converse with a Yue speaker any more than a Russian speaker would be able to converse with a Po…

It’s pretty clear Google Translate only outputs Madarin in Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Find a person from either side of the strait, as long as they’re literate and have been taught some version of Madarin, they should understand either version of at least 90% of phrases on the linked page (do a verbatim T2C/C2T first if they have trouble recognizing some characters), only one version may be slightly weird.

Also, you’re very mistaken if you think all versions of English are mutually intelligible.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#165

Post by JCharante »

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…

I personally believe the Chinese writing system to be superior because of the information density which leads to in my opinion better web UIs.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#166

Post by Jamesbeyond »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #158
kwanbix wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I work with a friend who is Chinese and she often takes notes while learning things. She is at least as fast as I am at longhand writing in English AND she has to translate to Chinese on the fly. Also she ends up with WAY more compact notes than would be possible in an alphabet. I think maybe it's English that would benefit from being written in ideograms! The popularity of emoji is partly due to their compactness.

Yep, Chinese characters are terrifyingly complicated, but the Chinese language is more compact sentence-wise and text-wise. Actually, the Chinese were acutely aware of how inconvenient the heavily-stroked characters are. That's why they invented simplified Chinese.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#167

Post by JCharante »

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…

You don’t have to use pinyin to type Chinese on a computer. You can use the zhuyin input method.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#168

Post by darkwater »

yorwba wrote: post #123
darkwater wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thanks! (should have thought abou Wikipedia)

Well, I still think Latin alphabet (or the Arabic one, but I don't know it enough to be sure about it) is more optimized / easier to grasp conceptually when you don't know the word. For example one of the compounds illustrated mixes 2 pictographs, but one is used for the meaning and the other for the sound of the final word (the "to wash oneself" example); that doesn't sound easy to me.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#169

Post by alisonatwork »

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…

Not sure why you're being dumped on here. Written Chinese is objectively harder to learn than any other written language still in use today for exactly the reason that people need to memorize thousands of characters.

There is perhaps a benefit to having several mutually unintelligible languages all "sort of" compile back to the same written text, but that benefit is increasingly being eroded as the version of Mandarin spoken in mainland China becomes the lingua franca, not just inside China but also in parts of the diaspora.

If everyone is more-or-less able to understand spoken Mandarin, then it's no big leap to codify a phonetic written representation of that pronunciation, whether using Zhuyin or Pinyin or something else. It's a totally achievable goal, and we know it's achievable because Vietnam, Korea and Japan already did it. Claiming it's impossible is just Chinese exceptionalism.

The real question is not whether it's possible, or whether it would make the language easier to learn, it's whether Chinese-speaking people - and in particular the government with an authoritarian rule over the education of the overwhelming majority of Chinese-speaking people - want to do it. And the answer is they do not. And so it persists.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#170

Post by 4cao »

Aachen wrote: post #133
Y_Y wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What do people living in Taiwan call the 'other' China? Is "mainland China" a correct thing to say, or is the word "main" there implying that Taiwan is lesser and not an equal/peer state? I used the word China in other comments because I didn't know what to call it otherwise, hoping that in the context of Taiwan it is clear what I mean

大陸 /dàlù/ 'mainland' is used but often pejoratively. It's a politically charged issue as this article from a pro-KMT newspaper can attest: https://www.chinatimes.com/newspapers/20180520000567-260109

對岸 /duì àn/ 'opposite [side of the Taiwan] Strait' is a neutral term coined specifically to avoid the controversy.

If talking about politics, another neutral way could be to just say 北京 /Běijīng/.

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