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Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

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Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#81

Post by paulmooreparks »

kwanbix wrote: post #58
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???

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 the original commenter, but I live in Singapore where I am surrounded by Chinese characters and several Chinese dialects. The first issue is that there isn't one "Chinese" language. Mandarin is dominant as the official language in China, but even here in SG one can still hear Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, and a few other dialects. While these each have unique grammars, the characters for the most part can still be understood across dialects (and for languages like Hokkien, have been mapped to those characters). Also, for Mandarin, there are very few distinct sounds (phonemes), even accounting for tones, so there are many, many more homonyms than in, say, English. The characters help disambuguate, whereas spoken or phonetically-written Mandarin relies heavily on context.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#82

Post by jwilk »

Muromec wrote: post #75
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…

Because our alphabet doesn’t work for tonal languages and inventing a new one requires a king

Vietnamese is a tonal language that uses the Latin script. But yes, it's awkward.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#83

Post by rfoo »

kwanbix wrote: post #58
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???

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…

Alphabet-based writing is inferior. Convince me otherwise.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#84

Post by danwee »

londons_explore wrote: post #66
colordrops wrote: post #11

Isn't ChatGPT better than Google translate or deepl? Why doesn't google use a modern LLM to translate?

ChatGPT is a transformer model. Google pioneered transformer models specifically for translation. If ChatGPT outperforms google translate, I'd guess it's simply because chatGPT is a bigger model with more training data.

Must be something else, don't you think? If there's a company in the world who can just "adjust their model to make it bigger" that's Google. But they haven't done so. Perhaps Google doesn't care.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#85

Post by dcastm »

kwanbix wrote: post #58
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???

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…

Taking this to its logical conclusion, we should all be speaking Esperanto.

My guess is that there's a combination of network effects (i.e., 1.4 billion people already use it), cultural identity, and inertia.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#86

Post by 4cao »

danwee wrote: post #9

I'm using ChatGPT... who needs Google for translation? Either you know a little bit the target language and you are able to spot wrong translations (both in Google translate and ChatGPT) or you don't know enough about the target language and you trust the translation that is given to you (and in this case, ChatGPT is probably giving you a better translation)

Thing is, Google forces their translations upon everyone. For example if I want to check Taipei restaurant reviews on Google Maps with my interface language set to English, each of them shows up translated (poorly), and I have to click or tap every time to "see the original."

Translation quality is one issue, e.g. "加油！" being translated to 'add oil!' instead of something like 'keep up the good work!' which is what it is supposed to mean in this context figuratively. But there is also a bigger cultural issue in that Google developers do not allow for people being multilingual: just because I made a choice for the interface language doesn't mean I need everything else translated to it (with no opt-out).

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#87

Post by darkwater »

atorodius wrote: post #73
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…

Hot take: we also just memorize icons, they just happen to me made out of 26 symbols. But to read fast, you absolutely do use some high level icon based parsing, IMO

Definitely, but you can read a word you never came across (in a language were the Latin alphabet mapping is actually sane, like Italian or Spanish) by just knowing a few pronunciation rules, that depends on the language. Clearly English is not a good example for this, I know.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#89

Post by goblin89 »

Aachen wrote: post #25
raincole wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or is this "traditional Chinese" a language spoken It's not a spoken language. It's only for written text. > only in Taiwan? Only in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and oversea Taiwanese/HK communities.

Thanks. So essentially the site is saying that Google Translate outputs what I'd call (for simplicity) Taiwanese/Hong Hongese with a foreigner's "accent" (but in writing)? It sounds odd to me. If China doesn't speak Traditional Chinese, why would GTranslate output text with China's usage patterns

Be on the lookout for misinformation obscuring the fact that Cantonese (a.k.a. Yue), spoken in Hong Kong, is a language. It’s not mutually intelligible with Mandarin (unlike, say, Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, which is more or less Mandarin with a different accent and slightly different vocabulary) or other languages of Chinese family. Cantonese uses different transliteration systems as well (Pinyin doesn’t work for it).

Who’s mainly responsible for there to this day being no ISO standard for transliterating Cantonese, and its conspicuous absence from Google Translate (despite the whopping 86 million speakers—consider that Translate supports, say, Welsh, Basque, Dhivehi, and many others that are spoken by fewer than even one million), is probably obvious. That entity is much helped by the issue being opaque to most foreigners, who are sufficiently baffled by a completely different writing system to just not care and bundle all languages written in Chinese script into one basket.

Re: Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

#90

Post by londons_explore »

danwee wrote: post #84
londons_explore wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is a transformer model. Google pioneered transformer models specifically for translation. If ChatGPT outperforms google translate, I'd guess it's simply because chatGPT is a bigger model with more training data.

Must be something else, don't you think? If there's a company in the world who can just "adjust their model to make it bigger" that's Google. But they haven't done so. Perhaps Google doesn't care.

Google Translate is a relatively small product with a relatively small budget. It doesn't bring in a huge amount of users or revenue.

The engineers working on it seem to be focussing on supporting small languages (ie. languages that only a few million people speak - africa and india have lots of those, both big growth markets). They're also working on better apps - for example being to translate text inside images, text from a video feed, live translation of captions, etc.

It makes sense that they probably wouldn't be deploying a huge chunk of compute there to get a few marginal quality gains.

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