Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

isgooglefixed.tw

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 229 posts

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#101

Post by 4cao »

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???

I'd say perhaps 5 or so of the ~100 entries on the list are somewhat debatable. The rest seems pretty obvious and indisputable, and among these I would count the "通過"/"透過" that you mentioned. If anything, perhaps the whole list is too focused on the IT lexicon. But it's pretty much solid work, doesn't really deserve a "mixed opinion" - in my opinion.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#102

Post by uranusjr »

jameshush wrote: post #59
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???

I'm a Western who has lived in Taipei for almost three years. I use Google Translate every day of my life. It's helped me book restaurant reservations and talk to my doctor. I also grew up in Canada, have British parents, and lived in the USA for seven years, so I'm used to switching from "Traditional English" to "Simplified English" too ;-) I mean, ya, sometimes Google Translate uses Mainland China words (e.g., I ju…

自行車 is used since way before mainland China influence is significant, although 腳踏車 has always been indeed more colloquial. Rejecting 自行車 is like rejecting winter squash as American English only because you grow up calling it pumpkin. As parent said, author really seems to have shockingly little experience with non-colloquial Taiwanese Chinese to confidently publishing such a page.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#103

Post by kwanbix »

mvdtnz wrote: post #78
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…

This is by far the most ignorant and racist comment I have seen on this website.

Why would you think so?

I mentioned that I didn't know and that was ignorant on the matter, and I wanted to know what people thought what the reasons are.

I have a multi-racial family, friends from across the globe (including china), and I am far from racist.

I think your comment is the most ridiculous and rude comment I have seen on this site

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#104

Post by uranusjr »

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…

Eh, you can find at least three (Traditional) Chinese input methods on any given modern system, and Pinyin is only one of them. Cangjie and Bopomofo require no understanding to Latin alphabets. Not to mention there are other less used methods such as Boshiamy.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#105

Post by quenix »

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…

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

I'm a bit confused—can you think of some examples where GT would default to British English translations over American English?

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#106

Post by shawabawa3 »

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…

Chinese people could very easily ask "why has the western world not switched to the Chinese alphabet?"

Neither is objectively superior to the other, you are just used to what you were born into

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#107

Post by lucas_codes »

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…

In Taiwan, they don't use Latin script to type, but a phonetic script based on character radicals called bopomofo

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#108

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

Aachen wrote: post #25
raincole wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or is this "traditional Chinese" a language spoken It's not a spoken language. It's only for written text. > only in Taiwan? Only in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and oversea Taiwanese/HK communities.

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

I'd be like if Belgium used Dutch but with the Cyrillic alphabet. It's still the same language but with another way of writing it and some regional differences. (To be clear, this is about Mandarin used in Taiwan, Taiwanese and Cantonese are different languages which Google Translate does not support)

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#109

Post by shawabawa3 »

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 "Traditional Chinese as being used in Taiwan". The alternative option for Google to fix this problem is to officially drop zh-TW support and switch to an appropriate language code instead, such as zh-Hant.

Post reply on HN