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Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

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Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#201

Post by croes »

kwanbix wrote: post #194
croes wrote: post #180

Earlier 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.

Easy to say if you already are used to one language.

Maybe better to compare it to languages that also use letters to represent words but aren't from the same family.

Maybe Arabic.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#202

Post by coopierez »

alisonatwork wrote: post #169
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…

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 Mandari…

Also - should the thing we optimise for in a language be how easy it is to learn? You learn a language in a small fraction of the duration you will actually use it for.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#203

Post by [deleted] »

liendolucas wrote: post #36

One funny thing that I found not long ago is that you can traverse a long chain of word translations by re-feeding the translated word. You start with a word let's say in italian, get it translated to spanish. Now you grab that word in spanish and translate back it to italian. You do sometimes a get a different word. You do this again and again. There doesn't seem be a one to one correspondence in certain cases. Don'…

[deleted]

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#204

Post by mikhailfranco »

liendolucas wrote: post #36

One funny thing that I found not long ago is that you can traverse a long chain of word translations by re-feeding the translated word. You start with a word let's say in italian, get it translated to spanish. Now you grab that word in spanish and translate back it to italian. You do sometimes a get a different word. You do this again and again. There doesn't seem be a one to one correspondence in certain cases. Don'…

It is essentially a fan-out tree across the thesauruses of the languages, so very unlikely to converge, unless there is one overwhelmingly preferred common meaning in all the languages.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#205

Post by keepamovin »

raincole wrote: post #145
keepamovin wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that sucks. Isn't that related to (or the same as) Hakkawa?

Hakka is yet another language. Yeah there are so many "Chinese" languages...

Oh, right...Taiwanese is actually Fujianese/Fokkienese right? Or are there differences?

SO MANY...ugh...despite the best efforts of the Mandarins

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#206

Post by [deleted] »

4cao wrote: post #170
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

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/.

[deleted]

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#207

Post by robjan »

zirgs wrote: post #177
uranusjr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I understand - Pinyin is still the most popular one. It also is compatible with all standard Latin keyboards and doesn't require touchscreens or microphones. So pretty much all educated Chinese people are familiar with the Latin alphabet. But for most people outside China - the Chinese alphabet looks like gibberish.

Pinyin is used in regions where Simplified Chinese is the predominant written language, but other systems are generally used in regions where traditional Chinese is the written language e.g Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#209

Post by brational »

MarcusE1W wrote: post #6

I think DeepL is considered to be quite good for translations nowadays https://www.deepl.com/translator

Their Spanish-English is significantly more idiomatic than google but as others have said - far fewer languages supported. But I suspect deepl will continue to be better than google as they grow.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#210

Post by throwaway290 »

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…

Your first mistake is assuming Chinese is a language, it's a writing system (now two writing systems) used by separate languages.
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