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Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

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41–50 of 229 posts

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#41
post #26

This is an interesting issue. Simplified and Traditional are different (but closely related) writing systems that can be used to express the exact same text. They are not different linguistic variants of Chinese. It looks like regardless of which writing system you choose, Google still translates into the most widely used variant of Chinese: Standard Chinese, as spoken on the mainland. It just writes the result using…

To clarify, "Standard Chinese" is the English term to describe the official language of the PRC. There is no country called "mainland," nor is there a country called "mainland China," nor is there a language that can be accurately called "Chinese." It's much more clear in Mandarin itself, such as 官話. Note that some might translate this as "Traditional Chinese," separate from the typical meaning, when trying to separa…

The Mainland is a well established concept when talking about China.

"Standard Chinese," "Mandarin Chinese," or however you want to call it (there are several terms in Chinese itself that refer to essentially the same thing) is the official language both on the mainland and in Taiwan. They have slightly different variants, but both standards grew out of the same historical movement to standardize Chinese. Both the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China wanted to create a national standard to enable universal communication in the country, and the PRC essentially adopted the standard the ROC had been working on.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#42

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'…

maybe the word is a homonym in one language, but isn't in the other

languages don't have a strict bijective mapping between them

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#43

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'…

There used to be a website that would automate this process until either the phrase stabilised, or it reached a maximum number of iterations.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#44
post #42

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'…

maybe the word is a homonym in one language, but isn't in the other languages don't have a strict bijective mapping between them

But I do get way more accurate and consistent translations from other sites.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#45
post #28

I now use chatGPT for translating english to traditional Chinese and give me some variations. Definitely works better than Google translate. For example for "I want to build a good gym routine": 我想建立一個良好的健身計畫。 Wǒ xiǎng jiànlì yīgè liánghǎo de jiànshēn jìhuà. Here are some variations of the sentence along with their English translations: 我想制定一套有效的健身計劃。 Wǒ xiǎng zhìdìng yī tào yǒuxiào de jiànshēn jìhuà. I want to creat…

I also do this with translations between Swedish, Danish and English. I find it fascinating that chatGPT is better at translating (a lot better) than a tool specifically built for it, when (if I understand correctly) chatGPT was in no way designed to translate, and is only in some way predicting text, one word at a time. How come google hasn't leveraged better existing tech to make the translations better? Is it too…

You can check if translations are also better on Bard, that would partly answer that question

I assume the low latency you get from Google Translate is not feasible with current LLMs like ChatGPT. Translate is used to translate sentences on the go, live videos, translate entire web pages ; all of these would be too expensive (and slow) with an LLM... but things might change in the coming months/years as the tech improves.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#46
post #31
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given the larger population of China to Taiwan Taiwan is its own country. India has a similar population to China. Why not just translate into Urdu or Tamil instead, by that logic?

Please read the rest of the comment. I was assuming that what is called "Traditional Chinese" is used in China, based on its name (Chinese) and that GTranslate outputs it. Urdu and Tamil aren't spoken in China and isn't what GTranslate outputs when you select a Chinese language, afaik

> "Traditional Chinese" is used in China

It is not. Traditional Chinese is not used in mainland china. It was superceded by simplified Chinese in areas controlled by the Chinese communist party.

This is a rather basic piece of knowledge when discussing Taiwan and Chinese relations.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#47

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'…

This is pretty much the reason for the existence(and fun) of translationparty.com....

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#48

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'…

A related idea: https://www.translationparty.com/

[Un]fortunately, ja-en machine translation is dramatically better than it was when this website was launched, I guess it was more than 10 years ago. It used to devolve into really bizarre stuff.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#49
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given the larger population of China to Taiwan Taiwan is its own country. India has a similar population to China. Why not just translate into Urdu or Tamil instead, by that logic?

I don't think your point is relevant here. They speak the same language in China and Taiwan: Mandarin Chinese. The question is whether to use more Taiwanese-sounding phrases when traditional characters are requested.

A very similar (just more technical/less known) point that's pretty close would be enforcing Sanskritised Hindi written in devanagari on anyone trying to use Persian-influenced words or Urdu. (Or vice versa.)

This seems purely political and obviously divisive: Taiwan (& HK) has its own history and China doesn't want it to.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#50
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…

British vs. American English seems like a good analogy given that they also have distinct language codes. Would Google translate camión to lorry vs. truck depending on en-GB vs. en-US?
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