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Don't guess my language

vitonsky.net

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Re: Don't guess my language

#371

Post by lesostep »

carlosjobim wrote: post #339
xorcist wrote: post #292

Much more importantly: Never ever auto-translate content to the user's language. Present what languages you actually have the data in. The user is smart enough to click the "translate" button in the web browser should they want. That translation is also likely to be better quality. English is not my first language. Or my second. But I understand it well enough to work in it every day. And I never ever want to wade th…

Machine translation has been good enough for a few years, that even native speakers don't notice it.

Which makes it soo much worse, actually.

I often go through a few sentences or even entire paragraphs before stumbling onto something that doesn't make sense. And then I have to go back and reread everything.

Microsoft documentation is the worst offender. Their "some parts were translated automatically" notice is hard to, well, notice. And their translation is great! — until it doesn't work, because UI has different translation.

Re: Don't guess my language

#372

Post by gield »

Guillaume86 wrote: post #158
gield wrote: post #74

This is a real pain in the ass in Belgium. Many websites assume I speak French while my native language is Dutch. Some websites only offer a French version of their Belgian storefront, even though Dutch accounts for ~60% of Belgians. I can't imagine what it's like for German-speaking Belgians. This is not only an issue on websites but also on apps. For example, the Books and Podcasts apps on iOS show me both Dutch-sp…

It's exactly the same problem on lots of websites if you're a french speaking belgian don't worry, you just don't notice it in that case.

Oh yes, I'm sure it's the same for French-speaking Belgians! And probably 100 times worse for German-speaking Belgians.

Re: Don't guess my language

#373

Post by qiine »

int_19h wrote: post #362
whstl wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this is coming from Reddit itself. It's using different URLs, and they seem to be making an effort to SEO-rank those translations.

It's interesting that the quality is so low. You can do very good translations for many languages today even with fairly cheap LMs, but for some reason (cost?) automated translation online seems to be still mostly at Google Translate level.

its impressive how poor the end result turnout, when zero effort want to be spent

Re: Don't guess my language

#374

Post by roelschroeven »

Orygin wrote: post #242
roelschroeven wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This drives me nuts. Once upon a time French was used even in the Dutch speaking parts, in government, economy, high society. That was long before the internet got popular though. We've had a long fight to get rid of French in Flanders. Dutch is the only official language in Flanders, and it's the language people speak (except expats, or migrants who haven't learned the language yet). So when companies still assume B…

You'll be glad to hear (I guess) that the pain is shared by french speaking Belgians. It happens all the god damn time that the websites render in Dutch (or I guess Flemish) instead of the set Accept Language I have (EN then FR). Google is regularly showing me results in Dutch, most online stores default to Dutch even if they have English and French versions available. Just imagine, all the websites that correctly (f…

Glad to hear how the other side of the country experiences things -- that happens not nearly enough, we (and our media) tend to focus too much on our part of the country (in my opinion).

Not glad to hear you have the same problems (only different).

I wasn't really talking about French companies though; I've seen it with large American or Korean companies. I'm gonna say companies like Nvidia or Samsung; I'm not sure about these two exactly, but I've certainly seen it with companies of that caliber.

Re: Don't guess my language

#375

Post by carlosjobim »

xorcist wrote: post #366
carlosjobim wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what level you consider DeepL or Kagi Translate, but those two can translate at a level which is indistinguishable from a native speaker.

These types of statements are hard to take seriously. Those tools are remarkably good for what they are, and the fact that they can help me understand texts in foreign languages is amazing. But indistinguishable from a professional native translator (which I take it you mean, being a language native is not enough to be a translator) is something else entirely. If you really believe that, why not recruit a professiona…

I use these DeepL and Kagi Translate to sell products and do complicated deals with people whose language I don't understand. None of them have ever said anything to indicate that the writing is sub-par, and we sometimes have very long e-mail chains to iron out details.

I have in fact had professional translators look extensively at AI translated material, and their verdict was that the translations are perfectly fine but maybe that the AI sometimes expresses itself in a funny or strange way. Well, that's what people do as well.

Maybe it's not indistinguishable from native, but it's indistinguishable from a person who is fluent in the language, and that's the only thing which matters. Because the purpose is to communicate.

The trick is to first write in your native language in a way that is extremely clear and devoid of any risks of the receiver misunderstanding any part. This works best, whether the reader is another human or an AI translator.

Re: Don't guess my language

#376

Post by carlosjobim »

lesostep wrote: post #371
carlosjobim wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine translation has been good enough for a few years, that even native speakers don't notice it.

Which makes it soo much worse, actually. I often go through a few sentences or even entire paragraphs before stumbling onto something that doesn't make sense. And then I have to go back and reread everything. Microsoft documentation is the worst offender. Their "some parts were translated automatically" notice is hard to, well, notice. And their translation is great! — until it doesn't work, because UI has different…

How would it be better if you couldn't read it or write it?

Re: Don't guess my language

#377

Post by account42 »

numpad0 wrote: post #329
vikingerik wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a circular dependency: how do you sort and list the locales or languages for someone to pick one, when by definition you don't know their locale yet? You have to either make some best-guess approximation (IP geo, browser headers, etc) or use a locale-invariant sort, both of which will be wrong in some cases.

can't you just sort all as int? the codepages usually come roughly sorted, and while no one knows which of 檎 or 橙 comes first, I don't think it'll be particularly offensive whichever way a random app did, to most.

There is no such thing as standard codepage numbers.

Re: Don't guess my language

#378

Post by account42 »

bluGill wrote: post #289
plastic3169 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 700+ million people living in Europe. The countries are tiny, most have bunch of official languages. The fix would be to use users selected language and not to flip flop it based on location. IP based location guessing doesn’t work even down to right country in here.

That is not an incentive. There is nothing in to for Google. It is of course useful for those 700+million, but they are not customers of Google, they users/the product. So long as you won't go elsewhere (in mass) you don't matter.

They have the same incentive as they have for adding localization in the the first place.

Re: Don't guess my language

#379

Post by account42 »

sneak wrote: post #241
j16sdiz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One don't need to travel to be multilingual. Many EU country have more than one official languages. Most previous colony is bilingual.

I was replying to doix, not TFA.

Still applies. I don't want to have google forcing the "local" language on me even in the country I live in (which is also the country on my passport).

Re: Don't guess my language

#380

Post by account42 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #376
lesostep wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes it soo much worse, actually. I often go through a few sentences or even entire paragraphs before stumbling onto something that doesn't make sense. And then I have to go back and reread everything. Microsoft documentation is the worst offender. Their "some parts were translated automatically" notice is hard to, well, notice. And their translation is great! — until it doesn't work, because UI has different…

How would it be better if you couldn't read it or write it?

The whole point is that in many cases we can read the original language just fine and have our browser set up accordingly, but these companies think they know better.
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