Has Google Translate been fixed yet? • Hacker News Board

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#221

Post by etmmte » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 3:52 AM UTC

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #30

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…

"Traditional characters" and "Simplified characters" are writing systems, not languages. You can write many variants of Chinese with either system. Traditional characters are still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, while simplified characters are standard on the mainland and in Singapore. However, traditional characters are still used in some niche cases on the mainland (such as decorations, names of shops and restaurant…

If the locale code says zh-TW then it should translate to Taiwanese-flavored Mandarin for sure.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#222

Post by sorz » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 4:40 AM UTC

shawabawa3 wrote: post #109

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…

> 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? They addressed this: > NOTE: The Google Translate menu only says "Chinese (Traditional)". However, if you pick the option, you will see the language code reflected in the URL is zh-TW, which means "…

The whole post is on base on the fact that "TW" in their URL. But I think this is really just a internal implementation detail of Google Translate, which is not intended to display to users (e.g. complete hidden on their app). Everywhere on their UI shows "Chinese (Traditional)". That is what they try to communicate with users.

Sure, zh-TW is somewhat misleading. But they nor say that parameter is a ISO 639 or RFC 5646 conformed.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#223

Post by sfmike » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 4:42 AM UTC

izacus wrote: post #135

sfmike wrote: post #3

google maps also in taiwan made me ride on the highway on a motorbike which isn't allowed and got a nice ticket for following googles directions even with avoid highways enabled.

Google Maps did make you do anything. It's a dumb tool that is not always correct made by people in USA. You decided to forgo basic due diligence in a foreign country.

didn't*

It's important especially when saying something is dumb, or telling someone they're foregoing basic due diligence, to spell correctly or the statement can lose it's poignancy.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#224

Post by j7ake » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 5:54 AM UTC

kenneth wrote: post #217

j7ake wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reason…

While they use the same script, they are not interchangable. A person from Taiwan would recognize characters in a HK or Japanese newspaper but would not necessarily understands it. A good half would only make sense to someone who speaks Cantonese. Also, several languages have moved from a script if iconographic characters to phonetic ones: for example Vietnamese and Korean, the former adopting a phonetic western alph…

Someone from Taiwan can read a HK newspaper no problem.

The pinyin phonetic alphabet only works for mandarin, while a unified written script applies beyond mandarin.

Learning written Chinese not only connects you across varying spoken Chinese languages, but also connects you with the rich history of Classical Chinese text.

The formal pinyin system is great, and should be used along side with the actual Chinese characters. But there is no reason to replace the rich written Chinese characters, which connects across space and time, with a narrow and hollow substitute.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#225

Post by mariuolo » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 11:19 AM UTC

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…

> Honest question, why haven't china moved to a western (?) alphabet based writing?

I wanted to link an article written by a linguist, but I couldn't find it. One of the hurdles would be tones: in order to express them, one would have to use plenty of diacritics and westerners would not be able to pronounce them correctly anyway.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#226

Post by darkwater » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 12:55 PM UTC

lucubratory wrote: post #216

darkwater wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sou…

There are enough radicals that it's reasonably common you can indicate both the likely correct pronunciation and a bit of the meaning with one of them, and radicals can also be compounded/nested (e.g. combine two radicals to make a character, then that character is used as a radical in another character). It's why the standardised vocabulary test, HSK, is so important, because very often more technical or less common…

First of all, I'm pretty sure that my PoV is biased by the fact that I'm European and grew up in a Latin alphabet world. With that said, I'm not saying that Chinese writing hinders Chinese people capability or development - China had been and it's becoming again the leading country in the world on many aspects - but just as programming languages syntax go, the same applies to human languages. Python syntax is simpler and less verbose then old-school Java for example, but that doesn't mean that shitty software can be written in Python and great software can be written in Java, or that someone cannot learn Java as their first programming language. Maybe there are some mental tricks and shortcuts that kick in with pictographs that I'm not aware of because I'm not a language expert or a Chinese speaker, and that make everything simpler for the brain that what I can imagine from my point of view. Thanks for the interchange anyway, I learned something new :)

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#227

Post by Y_Y » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 1:52 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #219

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.

Taiwan absolutely does not call itself China. At best the government that holds sovereignty in Taiwan is called the Republic of China, and yet daily everyone calls the country itself "Taiwan," and in fact even the passports were recently changed to say "Taiwan" in enormous letters to remove any confusion about what the people want. The government would change its name to also be Taiwan, or maybe Republic of Taiwan or…

But the constitution does say it.

And so does Tsai Ing-wen:

> “We don’t have a need to declare ourselves an independent state,” Tsai told the BBC. “We are an independent country already and we call ourselves the Republic of China, Taiwan.”[0]

So it's not factually incorrect. Of course the issue is fraught and just saying "the country on Formosa is called the Republic of China" would be completely deceptive, but nobody is doing that.

Talk about Chinese politics is always heated but I don't appreciate being accused of being disingenuous.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/15/tsai-ing-wen-s...

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#228

Post by nightfeather » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 3:57 AM UTC

quanloh wrote: post #218

nightfeather wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's another thing we currently struggled with: some of them start seeping into our surroundings. And part of the reason come from these translation tools, there are many translated materials (website, documentations, etc) produced using tools that do not correctly handle the difference, and those content creators don't really care about that.

Really curious how people views "cultural pollution" so differently. There are some words/usage we takes directly from japan and no one complains, for example 一枚入, 定食, do we need to change those back to what we would have said before influenced by Japan? What I mean is, culture/language slowly evolves, they aren't stagnant, as long as the world are progressing, as long as we are interacting with each other, language…

Yup, I know it's more like a preference problem.

But this is also how culture works, we can and want to choose what to accept and what to reject, and just don't want to be the same as the ones who keep acting hostile to us.

Another thing is, related to the OP mainly focused on, they have tendency to oversimplifying words and merging words that are not related, which would cause problem when we communicate.

Take '質量' as mostly used example, which only means mass of matter in zh_TW, but it may also mean quantity and quality in zh_CN, and the list goes on and on.

And about those Japanese words, they don't pollute our tools like the ones in OP stated, we have to choose to use them.

edit: typo, more words

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#229

Post by komali2 » Thu, Aug 24, 2023, 7:53 AM UTC

Y_Y wrote: post #227

komali2 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taiwan absolutely does not call itself China. At best the government that holds sovereignty in Taiwan is called the Republic of China, and yet daily everyone calls the country itself "Taiwan," and in fact even the passports were recently changed to say "Taiwan" in enormous letters to remove any confusion about what the people want. The government would change its name to also be Taiwan, or maybe Republic of Taiwan or…

But the constitution does say it. And so does Tsai Ing-wen: > “We don’t have a need to declare ourselves an independent state,” Tsai told the BBC. “We are an independent country already and we call ourselves the Republic of China, Taiwan.”[0] So it's not factually incorrect. Of course the issue is fraught and just saying "the country on Formosa is called the Republic of China" would be completely deceptive, but nobod…

"Republic of China" is a dramatically different name than "China." To claim that both the PRC and Taiwan call themselves the same name is to muddy the waters and contribute to the PRC's cultural imperialism through linguistic mechanism.

Furthermore, though Tsai Ing-Wen is the president of the RoC, as I said, there's a rising independence movement separate from the settler-colonial government of the RoC. Among these people, and the majority of Taiwanese, Taiwan is "Taiwan," and "RoC" is at best a formality, at worse an unchosen government underwritten by an unchangeable constitution.

The new passport illustrates the point decisively: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Republic...

If you're unintentionally muddying the waters that's one thing, but I react strongly because I strongly oppose anybody that assists the PRC's cultural imperialism.