Hasn't LLM technology mostly made google translate obsolete? Are there still use cases for it?
Conversation mode, translate text on an image, latency, # of supported languages
Has Google Translate been fixed yet?
191–200 of 229 posts
Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?
#192Earlier 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…
The icons are made up of strokes and there are only a handful of strokes in Chinese writing. The combination of strokes and the location is arguably as complicated as spelling in English.
When I read anything, be it mandarin or Japanese or English, I attach meanings to words first. In fact, I am attaching meaning to logical structures and phrases, and then the individual words make the detail. Converting words into sounds seems to be a different skill from converting words into meaning. It really doesn’t matter whether the words are made of strokes or letters of the alphabet, the breakdown of the little details is a separate mechanism from comprehension.
Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
But you can make the same argument for any non-englisb language today - any language is more difficult to use than English when it comes to computers. For the general case, if your friend was living in China, it'd be the norm, there wouldn't be any Saturday classes. The diaspora has to make do. Moreover, in China, it is the norm, they do not perceive their writing as being problematically difficult, they've made do w…
I have absolutely no trouble using spanish or german on my computer. Only 2 more keys.
Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
But memorizing words is relatively easy. Adding to that the drawing is not. I am not saying it is impossible, it is not obviously. My mother language is Spanish, so I also have 26 letters.
>林 (lín): This character means “forest” or “woods” and is composed of two 木 (mù) characters side by side. It represents a small forest or a group of trees. 森 (sēn): This character also means “forest” but represents a larger, denser forest than 林 (lín). It is composed of three 木 (mù) characters arranged in a triangle. That's more logic between the symbols of tree, wood and forrest than between the same english words,…
Spanish has accents in the a, e, i, o, u. I never use them, ans is still understandable. If you really believe that writing chinese is easer than writing in Spanish, you are absolutely wrong.
Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
If, as you are claiming, the Taiwanese don't have their own Taiwanese Mandarin, with their language being just the same as the Mandarin used in China, how can it be that at the same time they also don't get to have a say in what constitutes the "standard" of that "common" language they share with the "mainland?" Also, there is no reason for constantly calling it "Mainland China" where you could just as well call it "…
> If, as you are claiming, the Taiwanese don't have their own Taiwanese Mandarin, with their language being just the same as the Mandarin used in China This is like saying the Canadians and the Americans each have their own unique language. They speak the same language, with small dialectal differences, and small differences in official standards (semi-official, in the case of the US). The internal differences in Man…
Whether Taiwanese Mandarin is a separate language or not is a matter of opinion. Delving further into this debate will not lead to an interesting discussion as the definition of what constitutes a language is ultimately blurry. So I'm not making a claim either way, just an observation that you can't have it both ways: if the languages are separate, whatever goes on in China is irrelevant. If it is the same language, then the way it is spoken in Taiwan is no less "standard." It seems you agree with the latter, so let's leave it at that.
I don't think the website is trying to "emphasize the differences," just point out the issues with Google Translate: namely that the output for "zh-tw" does not reflect the language actually used by people in Taiwan, and to that end it betrays the trust of the user. Of course it only lists where the problems are, so it's not a balanced view by definition. It focuses on what needs to be fixed.
In particular, as similar as the two languages or variants are to each other, nearly all the vocabulary relating to modern technologies developed separately, and is fairly distinct. I've never tried it but I can imagine a Google-translated text heavy on computer-related vocabulary can easily end up being unintelligible to a Taiwanese, which constitutes poor quality of service on Google's part.
Taiwan is a separate market for Google, and from the business perspective they would do best not to alienate their users there. Of course it is a free service with no reasonable expectation of quality. But if someone went to the trouble of listing all the issues, the problem might be worth addressing even for purely reputational reasons. I read through the whole word list and I'd say it's at least 95% accurate. Frankly, I'm surprised it sparked such a debate.
As for "Mainland China," you are technically correct about the scope. The term has its use in certain contexts if one is aiming to be very precise (or pedantic). But here it's tangential to the discussion.
Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?
#196Taiwanese 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 was in Taiwan and trying to direct a cab. I looked up the words left and right.
It translated to left and correct.
What followed was the driver asking me “left or right?” And me saying “correct!” And he would turn left in confusion I would start shouting “correct correct” while getting more frustrated. He was like “great I’m doing good” while I was pointing the other way.
Good times I eventually had a chat with him and looked up “turn right” after driving around a block twice using left turns lol
Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
>林 (lín): This character means “forest” or “woods” and is composed of two 木 (mù) characters side by side. It represents a small forest or a group of trees. 森 (sēn): This character also means “forest” but represents a larger, denser forest than 林 (lín). It is composed of three 木 (mù) characters arranged in a triangle. That's more logic between the symbols of tree, wood and forrest than between the same english words,…
Spanish has accents in the a, e, i, o, u. I never use them, ans is still understandable. If you really believe that writing chinese is easer than writing in Spanish, you are absolutely wrong.
Speaking as another native spanish speaker, I also basically never use accents. I sometimes add them by applying spellchecker suggestions in formal writing (Work emails, etc) when I see the red squiggles.
Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?
#198I think there's just a large profit incentive for corporations to treat Taiwan like it's part of China. I found a Leap Frog globe in walmart the other day and it told me Taiwan wasn't a country and was, in fact, just China.
Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?
#199Taiwanese 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…
For what it's worth, one of modern China's most famous writers, Lu Xun, was adamantly in favor of eliminating the characters. Your question is by no means stupid.
There are many reasons the characters have not been replaced by an alphabet. Ultimately, it comes down to the weight of tradition. Chinese has had basically the same writing system for 2000+ years. The characters are deeply embedded in Chinese culture, and the structure of the language itself is closely bound up with the characters. Only young kids use the alphabet, as a stepping stone to learning the characters, so proposing to use the alphabet comes across as if you want to dumb down the language. There are over a billion people who have learned how to read/write the characters, so the system has huge inertia and buy-in. As others have noted, this is like switching from imperial to metric, but a million times harder and emotionally fraught.
Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If, as you are claiming, the Taiwanese don't have their own Taiwanese Mandarin, with their language being just the same as the Mandarin used in China This is like saying the Canadians and the Americans each have their own unique language. They speak the same language, with small dialectal differences, and small differences in official standards (semi-official, in the case of the US). The internal differences in Man…
Whether Taiwanese Mandarin is a separate language or not is a matter of opinion. Delving further into this debate will not lead to an interesting discussion as the definition of what constitutes a language is ultimately blurry. So I'm not making a claim either way, just an observation that you can't have it both ways: if the languages are separate, whatever goes on in China is irrelevant. If it is the same language,…
> Whether Taiwanese Mandarin is a separate language or not is a matter of opinion.
There are dialect pairs where the question of whether they are separate languages is blurry. Taiwanese Mandarin and the official Mandarin of the PRC are nowhere near the level of difference where this question even arises. Mutual intelligibility is unproblematic.
> the output for "zh-tw" does not reflect the language actually used by people in Taiwan, and to that end it betrays the trust of the user.
If users were actually selecting "Taiwanese Mandarin," as opposed to "Chinese (Traditional)," and if Google were doing a decent job of translating into Chinese in the first place, I would agree with you. But neither is the case.