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Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

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Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#181

Post by sshine »

j7ake wrote: post #129
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…

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…

> Chinese writing is not phonetic

There is a similar thing going on with written arabic, where Ḥarakāt diacritics indicate short vowels, long consonants, and some other vocalizations, but these are generally left out of writing except in the Qur'an. So you have a classic phonetic key with which to recite the Qur'an, but almost all written text besides that can be read by wildly different speakers.

I'm amazed at how two (Mainland) Chinese people can always communicate.

The level of shared cultural foundation is beyond what we have in Europe, I believe.

The Chinese language is an absolute joy to learn.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#182

Post by goblin89 »

yorwba wrote: post #174
goblin89 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myanmar, while spoken by fewer people than Yue, benefits from an official standard for romanization from its own government (not ISO), and Jawi is a dialect of a language spoken by fewer than a thousand people total. When saying “little demand internationally”, could you clarify what international demand was there for a standard for romanizing Mandarin and why that is somehow not applicable to Yue?

> Myanmar, while spoken by fewer people than Yue, benefits from an official standard for romanization from its own government (not ISO) Said standard getting ignored by most Burmese people in favor of ad-hoc romanizations, similar to Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and Guangdong mostly ignoring various standards published by their respective governments. > Jawi is a dialect of a language spoken by fewer than a thousa…

We are discussing languages, not scripts.

Standard being ignored by laypeople doesn’t make it any less useful in formal contexts sensitive to ambiguity.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#183

Post by jeffchien »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #7
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???

> Really? Do you really want to translate mega to 百萬 (million) in any context? Would its use as a metric prefix not be a correct context for this?

Slightly besides your point, but there's a disagreement on Chinese SI prefixes for mega and tera. Most users might use Traditional Chinese in a Taiwan context in which 百萬 is correct, but it's possible for a Macau to use TCN and expect mega to translate to 兆. This is why Chinese Wikipedia has more specific settings than just Simplified vs Traditional. It doesn't surprise me to see Google Translate struggle with this term.

In any case, Bing and DeepL both agree with Google on translating it to 巨型 (giant).

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#184

Post by jefftk »

zirgs wrote: post #179
jefftk wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OK, but it doesn't work in situations where you don't want others to hear what you type. And in places with lots of noise.

In English I use speech to text a lot (including completely substituting it for typing for a year when I had wrist issues). If your microphone is right next to your mouth and you're using good software it works in surprisingly noisy environments: I can talk quietly directly into my mic on the subway without issues. And when I'm at my desk I use a boom mic next to my mouth, with similar benefits.

Quiet environments were, for me, more of an issue: it combines very poorly with open plan offices since you bother the people around you.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#185

Post by 4cao »

yorwba wrote: post #151
lm28469 wrote: post #147

It doesn't even translate the word "no" from english to slovak properly, it say it's "č" but should be "nie" https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=sk&text=no&op=trans...

"no" is an abbreviation for "number" and "č" is the correct translation for that interpretation: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C4%8D%2E (though Wiktionary only has Czech)

Shouldn't it be a "no.", with a period at the end?

Anyway, the translation is wrong given the context as no numeral follows.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#186

Post by oefrha »

goblin89 wrote: post #178
oefrha wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. A…

First, not every Yue speaker speaks Mandarin. Second, the fact that they also speak Mandarin (because it was a mandatory lesson at school or they were otherwise forced by circumstances to learn it) does not mean there should be no support in Translate for their native language, which incidentally dwarfs many languages that Translate does support in number of speakers. If you think that’s viable logic, you should try…

You can support whatever language/dialect you like, doesn’t mean Google Translate has to add it.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#187

Post by SeanLuke »

quenix wrote: post #105
SeanLuke wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It varies.

Italian("Uso l'acensore") -> "I use the lift"

Italian("Provo l'acensore") -> I try the elevator"

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#188

Post by lm28469 »

yorwba wrote: post #151
lm28469 wrote: post #147

It doesn't even translate the word "no" from english to slovak properly, it say it's "č" but should be "nie" https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=sk&text=no&op=trans...

"no" is an abbreviation for "number" and "č" is the correct translation for that interpretation: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C4%8D%2E (though Wiktionary only has Czech)

Sure sure, it literally doesn't happen with any other language I know of though

And it clearly isn't the translation anyone in the world would expect

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#189

Post by goblin89 »

oefrha wrote: post #186
goblin89 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, not every Yue speaker speaks Mandarin. Second, the fact that they also speak Mandarin (because it was a mandatory lesson at school or they were otherwise forced by circumstances to learn it) does not mean there should be no support in Translate for their native language, which incidentally dwarfs many languages that Translate does support in number of speakers. If you think that’s viable logic, you should try…

You can support whatever language/dialect you like, doesn’t mean Google Translate has to add it.

You totally can, but we are talking about Google Translate here, how it mislabels scripts as languages and how it doesn’t support a major language (for what is likely political reasons).

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#190

Post by amf12 »

herbst wrote: post #20

Is it just me or is translation in android completely broken as well? In the past I could select a word and translate it with the translate button. Now it most of the time triggers a Google search and adds words I didn't select.

> adds words I didn't select.

Because you may have enabled that. I just tried this and it gave me an option to enable the feature to include surrounding text for better context or something.

As for translation, I get a tooltip to translate, web search or Wikipedia search

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