Found in translation: More accurate, fluent sentences in Google Translate
blog.google
blog.google
Human translations of chinese, are rated worse than old google translations of other languages.
It's really interesting culturally, since modern written Chinese is split between Simplified (PRC) and Traditional (HK/TW/etc), because Mao thought Traditional was too difficult for the proletariat. Yet official national news sources in China are almost always given in formal Chinese, which nobody outside of the elite really speaks!
If you are talking about Modern Spoken Mandarin (or written Spoken Mandarin: SMS, social media) vs Modern Written Mandarin I don't think the gap is that large compared to other languages. Certainly a lot less than the gap between written Colloquial English and Formal English (more words of Latin origins).
Looking at the People's Daily website (which is presumably an official news source in China), it looks like standard newspaper Chinese. Should be readable for most Chinese people with at least primary education.
As someone learning Chinese, I can sympathize with Google Translate. Spoken Mandarin doesn't give you nearly as much context as more modern written Mandarin. I have no problem reading a newspaper but real conversation between Chinese people is just lost on me. It's not just a pace of listening thing, there is just too much of the sentence that isn't said out loud.
Go to any USA Today or WSJ article and read a paragraph out loud; no one talks like that.
As an example, take the sentence "kirja on työpöydälläni", which means "the book is on my desk". The word "työpöytä" (desk) gets two suffixes, "-llä" which corresponds to the preposition "on", and "-ni" which is the first-person genitive. But when speaking, this would easily come out as "kirja on minun työpöydällä" instead, where the noun doesn't isn't in the genitive form at all anymore, the genitive has become a separate word which is a pronoun with a genitive ("minun").
If you study just the grammatical rules and nothing else, you might think that the second sentence is obviously grammatically wrong. (Because according to the rule, the noun must change its case to correspond to the genitive.) Yet it's completely acceptable to say it aloud that way, even in a formal context, and nobody would bat an eye. While at the same time if you put it this way in any kind of writing, you would almost surely be notified by the grammar police that you have made a grave mistake.
I find this duality of language fascinating. And this will certainly continue producing problems for the field of machine translation. Google Translate is infamous in Finland for being near-useless for translating anything to or from Finnish.
It puts them all in the same bag, resulting in very strange translations when using it as target language.
Going the other way around, I am yet to properly translate any of the variants into a way that all verbs and articles keep their sense across languages.
For example, translating você to either Du or Sie in German, depending on the Portuguese variant being used.
This is understandable given the endpoints. Chinese almost completely lacks verb tenses, expecting everything to come from context. But AIUI, English is pretty much the opposite extreme, having more explicit verb tenses than most other languages. So the translation isn't able to fully flesh out from context what the English tense should be, and just gives a reasonable compromise.
Even with this mistake, it was quite readable.
In fact, the main difference seems to be less tripping up on mostly inconsequential small pieces of English grammar. It seems to have the same trouble as the old version in translating the meaning of sentences.
EN: As we wrap up the 2016 survey, I'd like to start by thanking everybody... DE: Als wir die Umfrage 2016 abschließen, möchte ich zunächst allen danken...
EN: This seems consistent with the hypothesis that the LW community hasn't declined in population so much as migrated into different communities. DE: Dies scheint im Einklang mit der Hypothese, dass die LW-Gemeinde nicht in der Bevölkerung sank so viel wie in verschiedene Gemeinden abgewandert.
As a student -> Als student OK As I drove -> Als ich fuhr OK past tense As I start -> Da ich anfage, so ich anfage, während ich ...
I think it's more practical for Germans to adopt the English usage then for you to learn this strange exception;)
The second sentence is not wrong per se, I am having trouble coming up with a better translation. I'd probably use Communities instead of Gemeinden, as Gemeinde is more municipality or parrish, and the original sentence refers to online communities, which for me are not entailed in Gemeinde(in this context at least).
In the second example it should be "... dass die LW-Gemeinde in der Bevölkerung nicht sank sondern eher in verschiedene Gemeinden abgewandert ist." But I'm having a hard time translating "so much as" in this context to German.
"Zum Abschluss der Umfrage 2016 möchte ich zunächst Ihnen allen danken". Note the "Ihnen", which isn't there in English but required for an idiomatic translation.
"Dies scheint im Einklang mit der Hypothese, dass die LW-Gemeinde nicht in der Bevölkerung abgenommen hat, sondern eher in andere Gemeinden abgewandert ist". Note that the "not so much" qualifier is applied to the first half in English, but the second half in German ("sondern eher" → "but rather").
I think stuff like novels or poetry would be way harder.
"In the medieval time of a roman emperor who had no regard for life and engaged in the most atrocious habits of mass slaughter, babarian footsteps made it all the way to the capitol."
In der mittelalterlichen Zeit eines römischen Kaisers, der keine Rücksicht auf das Leben hatte und sich mit den grauenhaftesten Gewohnheiten der Massenschlachtung beschäftigte, machten babarische Schritte den ganzen Weg bis zum Kapitol.
Humans are far better than other species at altering our environment to suit our preferences.
Die Menschen sind weit besser als andere Arten bei der Veränderung unserer Umgebung, um unsere Vorlieben.
The German is pretty much wrong and the actual meaning of the original sentence is hard to deduce in my opinion. That being said, computer translation has come very far in the last decade.
Just reading Korean is really hard for me b/c I'm not Korean... so this should help. It might not help my Korean language skill, though... or will it? Of course it also tends to devalue my skill of reading in Korean... or does it?
What I mean is, we already know several really impressive examples of how language models from recurrent neural networks can generate eerily natural random texts (e.g. this blogpost http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)
So even if we just trained it on an English corpus and fed random numbers into it, it would still output smooth and natural-sounding English sentences. Of course, here it is actually translating, but I wonder how often it will be "overconfident", i.e. generate a plausible-sounding sentence which doesn't at all correspond to the input text. Unlike a human translator, it won't say "sorry I'm not sure what that means".
"Google e Facebook declararam guerra aos sites de Internet que difundem notícias falsas, que o buscador e a rede social vão impedir que se beneficiem de seus serviços de publicidade."
"Google and Facebook have declared war on Internet sites that broadcast fake news that the search engine and social network will prevent them from benefiting from their advertising services."
_____
After the comma (which Google misses in its English translation), the word "que" (that) should be translated as "which" in this case. Also, the reflexive "beneficiar-se" (to benefit onself, used here in the imperative/command tense) seems to have confused Google, likely due to having missed the comma earlier. I took out the middle part of the second clause and translated only "que vão impedir que se beneficiem" and Google got it right, translating it as "which will prevent them from benefiting".
I have experience translating from BR-PT to EN (and even vice-versa for my own testing), and BR-PT native speakers have a habit of writing long-winded, run-on sentences in all sorts of published literature. I'm curious to see Google understand that aspect, which even trips me up once in a blue moon.
That feels like the wrong idiom in this context, just "once in a while" sounds better.
But I couldn't decide why it sounded wrong, so I googled "once in a blue moon". I didn't arrive at a conclusion, but: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=once+in+a+blue+moon
"once in a blue moon = 1.16699016 × 10-8 hertz"
Huh?!
IOW, once every 2.7 years. Google Calculator is genius.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2F(1.16699016+%C3%97+...
Not sure if your comment's implying it's a random number picked for amusement? That figure (2.7 years) seems about right to me -- the frequency of a blue moon is necessarily the same as the frequency that a lunisolar calendar has to add a leap month, which is every 2 or 3 years. I don't see any reason to doubt Google's number.
Bodes well for Google cloud, putting out your latest and greatest eases my thoughts as to whether its a first class citizen within Google. (I know the head of the Cloud unit is on Google's board which was a major sign of taking 'cloud' seriously.)
It correctly translated "I asked my son to take my bag because it was very heavy" and "I asked my son to take my bag because he was very strong" correctly from French, despite the 'he/it' both being the ambiguous 'il' in French.
"Government and ruling parties will raise the upper limit of the annual income (under 1,300,000 yen) of spouses subject to deduction to 1.3 million yen or 1.5 million yen, over the review of spousal deduction, which is the focus of the tax reform debate focused on in the 2017 tax reform debate I entered the adjustment with the plan. If the annual income of each husband exceeds 13.2 million yen (11 million yen for "income" minus the amount deemed necessary expenses for work), 11.2 million yen (9 million yen same), it is excluded from the system. The ruling party taxation study committee will review these two plans and aim to include it in the tax reform outline of FY2005"
Seems like there's still a long way to go.
(Copy/pasted original text: ２０１７年度の税制改正議論で焦点となっている配偶者控除の見直しを巡り、政府・与党は、控除対象となる配偶者の年収上限（１０３万円以下）を１３０万円か１５０万円まで引き上げる案で調整に入った。それぞれ夫の年収が１３２０万円（仕事の必要経費とみなされる額を差し引いた「所得」では１１００万円）、１１２０万円（同９００万円）を超える場合は制度の対象外とする。与党税制調査会はこの２案を軸に検討し、１７年度税制改正大綱に盛り込むことを目指す)
I wonder how it went from １０３万円以下 to "under 1,300,000 yen"
The mistake you pointed out seems rather odd. Computers are supposed to be good at arithmetic. With my limited knowledge of Chinese (that part is all Kanji) even I would get that right (under 1,030,000JPY). But that's the problem with neural or statistical translation - even with the code available, you can't easily tell why it's happened.
Perhaps it got confused because １３０万円 appears later in that sentence.
"(...) which is the focus of the tax reform debate focused on in the 2017 tax reform debate I entered the adjustment with the plan."
Where does "I" come from? What's the part of the sentence that follows it supposed to mean?
"If the annual income of each husband exceeds 13.2 million yen"
each husband?
"FY2005"
That one is funny, it translated １７年度 as meaning 平成１７年 (17th year of Heisei era, which is 2005) when what's meant is 2017.
Yeah, but that's totally plausible unless you know this is a text from 2016.
>Where does "I" come from?
The system has lost track of the subject (the government and ruling party) and put in "I" as the most likely candidate. This error is pretty dumb, to be honest, and no halfway competent human would make this mistake.
>What's the part of the sentence that follows it supposed to mean?
"entered the adjustment with the plan" is for ～案で調整に入る, which is quite difficult political lingo. The sentence should begin "the government and ruling party have entered discussions regarding (two different) proposals to raise the ..."
>each husband?
"Each" should be "[under] each plan"; the original omits the subject. Figuring out the meaning of それぞれ here would be hard for a lot of quite advanced Japanese learners, I think.
>funny, it translated １７年度 as meaning 平成１７年
Actually this is the more common interpretation - if it didn't say 2017 earlier in the text this would be a pretty safe bet. I guess they don't do text-level analysis yet?
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Anyway, I agree with what everyone else is saying - this is an impressive leap in making intelligible output for JtoE, but as a translator I'm not fearing for my job just yet.
When taken out of context, that would be true. That's however not the case in the original full text. See getoj's sibling reply. It would be clearer if there were a comma between それぞれ and 夫, though, but I don't know if that's my French bias wanting punctuation or if that would be "idiomatic".
> I wonder how it went from １０３万円以下 to "under 1,300,000 yen"
There is no million in Japanese counting, but 1万(man) is 10000. I think google did this to make reading easier, as otherwise you would have to make this conversion in your head when reading.
In either case it's wrong.
Meine lieben Kinder! Sveben brachte Frl. Moldelen die Rarte von Herrn Thomass mit du schoene Nachricht, dass R. doch endlich gut in Br. ankam. Was bin ich froh daruber! Und nun hoffe ich doch schr, dess Roesi Samstag mittag in R. ankem, sich schrubben u aus schlafen konnte. Dickes, hast Du Dir nichts gehalt bei der Rums Scheru? Mittwoch ging ich nach Tisch zur Stadt, be- sorgte Einiges u wollte im Hansahed in der Wilm. Str. haden. Musste aber 2 1/2 St. werde, dann war es aber sehr schoen. Ich mechte dann das Abendessen u erst um 8 h ging ich rauf ins Zimmer zum Tisch decken de fand ich den Zettel von Frl. B. mit Frl. Mol. dehns grusse von Dir! Meinen Schrucke koemmt Ihr Euch denken.
My dear children! Sveben brought Ms. Moldelen the Rarte From Mr. Thomass, with a nice news, That R. finally got well in Br. What I'm glad about it And now I hope Schr, dess Roesi Saturday noon in R. ankem, Could scrub u from sleeping. Thick, You have nothing to do with the Rums Scheru? Wednesday, I went to the city, Caused some u wanted in the Hansahed in the Wilm. Str. Had to be 2 1/2 St., Then it was very beautiful. I want to Then the dinner u went around 8 h I rise up into the room to cover the table I found the note of Miss B. with Miss Mol. Dehns greetings from you! My shrine You think.
In general, though, I've found Google Translate to fall over and produce gibberish with a single misspelling or grammatical error. That's ok when translating professionally edited text, but language in common usage tends to be a lot messier.
Meine lieben Kinder! Soeben brachte Frl. Moldelen¹ die Karte von Herrn Thomas mit der schönen Nachricht, dass R. doch endlich gut in Br. ankam. Was bin ich froh darüber! Und nun hoffe ich doch sehr, dass Rosi Samstag mittag in R. ankam, sich schrubben und ausschlafen konnte. Dickes, hast Du Dir nichts geholt bei der Rums Scheru? Mittwoch ging ich nach Tisch² zur Stadt, besorgte Einiges und wollte im Hansabad in der Wilm. Str. baden. Musste aber 2 1/2 Stunden werde, dann war es aber sehr schoen. Ich machte dann das Abendessen und erst um 8 Uhr ging ich rauf ins Zimmer zum Tisch decken, da fand ich den Zettel von Frl. B. mit Frl. Moldelens¹ Grüßen von Dir! Meinen Schrecken³ könnnt Ihr Euch denken.
¹ that's probably supposed to be the same name twice
² "nach Tisch" (after table) is old for "nach dem Essen" (after lunch/dinner)
³ old for "Meine Überraschung" (my surprise)
I have no idea what "Rums Scheru" could mean. Maybe it's referring to some event, hoping that the person didn't catch an illness there.
A lightly edited translation (not perfect, I just fixed some Google Translate mistakes) would be something like:
My dear children! Miss Moldelen had just brought Mr. Thomas's card with the good news that R. had finally arrived at Br. How glad I am about that! And now I hope very much that Rosi arrived in R. on Saturday afternoon and got a chance to scrub and sleep. Thick (referring to a person who's a bit thick, as a nickname), I hope you didn't catch anything at the Rums Scheru? On Wednesday I went to the city after lunch to run some errands, and wanted to go bathing in Hansabad in Wilm. street. Had to wait for 2 1/2 hours, but then it was very nice. I then went to make dinner, and at eight o'clock I went upstairs to set the table, where I found the note from Miss B. with Miss Moldelen's greetings from you! You can imagine my surprise.
I have a lot of other things I recognize have some historical value, like my father's WW2 diary, and some amazing color pictures he took during the Korean War. (Any other pictures of the KW I've seen are grainy black & white, but my dad's pictures are in crisp, full color.)
I wonder if one could couple auto-correct and translation in a way where the error rates don't multiply. I.e. only attempt corrections where the translation says it has low confidence.
I was afraid of that. It's because:
1. it's in a mix of cursive Suetterlin script and more modern forms. Many letters can only be distinguished if you know the context.
2. my German is limited to a few hundred words.
3. she didn't write very clearly, the last two letters of a word tended to be just a line :-)
But I can get far enough to get the general sense of what the letters were saying. The translations posted here, however, show how limited machine translation still is, and hence how far we still are from the singularity.
It'd be nice if someone was working on a system to transcribe cursive, in all its sloppy, messy glory.
German hasn't changed that much since the 1940s, however, there are dialects from the East (Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia) that are dead today. But as far as I know, they were not that different from today's High German.
Here is what I can guess from your original text. I'll expand the abbreviations I understand and correct the spelling. The translation is rather free, I'm trying to catch the sentiment so that the text makes sense to you.
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Meine lieben Kinder! Sveben (?, if that's a name I have never heard it) brachte Fräulein Moldelen die Karte von Herrn Thomas mit der schönen Nachricht, dass R. doch endlich gut in Br. ankam. Was bin ich froh darüber! Und nun hoffe ich doch sehr, dass Rosi Samstag Mittag in R. ankam, sich schrubben und ausschlafen konnte. Dickes, hast Du Dir nichts geholt bei der ... (no idea here)? Mittwoch ging ich nach Tisch zur Stadt, besorgte einiges und wollte im Hansabad in der Wilhelmstraße baden. Musste aber 2 1/2 Stunden warten, dann war es aber sehr schön. Ich machte dann das Abendessen und erst um 8 Uhr ging ich rauf ins Zimmer zum Tisch decken, da find ich den Zettel von Fräulein B. mit Fräulein Moldelens Grüßen von Dir! Meinen Schrecken könnt ihr euch denken.
My dear children! Sveben brought Ms. Moldelen the postcard from Mr. Thomas with the happy news that R. has arrived well in Br. after all. Imagine my relief! And now I'm hoping very much that Rosi has arrived Saturday noon in R., and that she was able to clean herself and have a good sleep. Sweety, didn't you get anything from ...? Wednesday I went into town after the meal, made some errands and wanted to take a swim in the Hansabad at Wilhelmstraße. Had to wait for 2.5 hours, but then I had a great time. I then made dinner, and only at 8 o'clock I went upstairs in the room to set the table, that was when I found the note from Miss B. with Ms. Moldelen's greetings from you. You can imagine my shock!
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Admittedly the last sentence does not make too much sense. Perhaps I guessed wrong from your transcription, hard to say.
Our baby is due in January.
goes to
Unser Baby ist im Januar fällig
My German colleagues assure me Google's neural network needs a bit more training on that one. I often use Google Translate to go back from the German I have (badly) created to English, as a further check that it's somewhat understandable. In terms of it replacing asking real humans for help... I think it's still a long way away, but good to see Google investing in it.
Freely translated: "Our baby is going down in January."
Interestingly I wouldn't know how to translate the German back to English while preserving the feel of the phrasing. Languages just don't map 1:1.
"Our baby is being scheduled for January"
which maybe brings some "huh?" But I'm not a native speaker, I'm just trying to get an opinion of these who are.
Just as another data point, I do. I'd only use it sarcastically, like
Und, wann ist denn der kleine Scheißer fällig?
I know that Modern Standard Arabic is not supported yet with the NML system but I just went and tried the translation for a small excerpt from an article on DW [1]
"بالرغم من عدم وجود تأكيدات رسمية منها على نيتها للترشح مجددا، قال قيادي بارز في حزبها إن المستشارة ميركل ستترشح لولاية رابعة. جاء ذلك على لسان المسؤول عن لجنة العلاقات الخارجية في البرلمان الألماني نوربرت روتغن. "
"Despite the lack of official confirmation, including the intention to run again, a senior leader of her party said that Chancellor Merkel will stand for a fourth term. This came on the tongue in charge of the Foreign Relations Committee in the German Parliament Norbert Rongn."
Of course, the translation is not perfect but good enough. However, I believe that they could do better by working on their Arabic text-to-speech synthesizer and having a toggle option for diacritics that would definitely help them with the synthesizer as there are many words pronounced wrong or actually very wrong that's disappointing.
All in all, great work by the people at Google Translate.
[1]: http://www.dw.com/ar/%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%8A-%D8%A8%D...
At first I was offended but then I realized he was just pulling my leg. He smiled and said, "I'm just yanking your chain." She added, "Don't mind him, he's always rattling someone's cage."
Zuerst war ich beleidigt, aber dann merkte ich, dass er gerade mein Bein zog. Er lächelte und sagte: "Ich zerrle gerade deine Kette." Sie fügte hinzu: "Kümmern Sie sich nicht um ihn, er ist immer rasseln jemandes Käfig."
But software's a good bet too ;)
"Das altbacken emotionale Muster einer zerstoerten Ehe aehnelt dem Neutrino-sturm eines sterbenden Gasgiganten" -"The old-fashioned emotional pattern of a ruined marriage resembles the neutrino storm of a dying gas giant"
(In the above I tried to confuse it using archaic words mixed with completely disconnected topics in the same sentence while still being grammatically correct.)
"Das verrueckte an der Sache ist der enorme Unterschied zwischen digitalem Denkmuster und analogem Sachverstand" - "The crazy thing about this is the enormous difference between digital thought patterns and analogous expertise"
Beautiful! [Disclaimer: studied linguistics]
There were times when it was translated literally - "a fan, manufactured from solid rock" (cieto iežu ventilators). Then for a brief moment it was translated as originally intended. Now, however, it translates to nonsense ("hard rock ventilators"), which losely may be translated back to English as "Hard rock fan", where "fan" refers to that thing which moves air around.
However, an article from Latvian news site was translated to English unexpectedly good. Which was not the case for English to Latvian translation, sadly. But it makes some kind of point if we consider English as lingua franca.
In one sense, calculators and computers haven't made learning arithmetic and other math less important. On the contrary.
Maybe in a similar way, by increasing the amount of communication between speakers and writers of different languages, tools like this might actually make language learning _more_ important? Or is that an interesting thought but completely wrong? Perhaps speaking and listening will gain in importance while writing and reading will decrease? Or is it not worth the time and trouble to learn another language anymore?
A penny for your thoughts. (OK, not a real penny ;)
Will there still be interest and investment in learning one of the biggest languages in the world, if you can just use translate.google.com? I hope not personally, but it does make me wonder if this will put things back somewhat as we get complacent and lean on technology to translate for us.
Then again, what about the calculator analogy? I'm sure that when calculators came out, some people must have thought it was the end of arithmetic studying, for example. And, I can do calculus with a machine, but more people study calculus now than ever before. Maybe languages are no different?
Our brains are shrinking and while some think it's because the brain are growing more efficient, others think it could be that we're becoming less intelligent. In the case of the latter, how do you know technology does not have a hand in this?
This study shows that using GPS technology has affected people's spatial awareness abilities [1]. I've stopped using GPS technology because of this, I no longer wanted to feeling "clumsy" and slow when traveling or hiking. There is also some talk of "The Google Effect" [2].
I'm definitely not anti-books and I'm certainly not anti-progress, but I honestly think it's naive to believe technology is always beneficial to society, always stands for progress, or that we're ready to posses certain technologies.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494407... [2] http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fea...
Not that it's a meaningful thing in itself.
Maybe people are going to limit themselves to learning a few words in a foreign language and translate the rest. But in 50 years, maybe all humanity will be learning a new language designed by AGI, a language with concepts that are revolutionary and completely different from ours, that will help us talk to the AGI on its level. Who knows what will come in languages. Google is already using a kind of interlingua to connect from any language to any language.
I welcome advances in machine translation with open arms, but I can only see them as an augmenter, not a replacement. Time will tell.
A more optimistic view is that machine translation might help those of us who still want to learn other languages. Though I still think grammar rules are needed when learning other languages.
Some people do care about riding and archery, and are right to do so. I even care about and practise foraging for food, lighting fires for cooking on, and navigating using astronomy or compass. It's important to be able to fall back on low technology in case your high technology fails.
When you travel in a foreign country there is a lot of respect given for people who can speak the language that you just don't get from walking around with a human or device translator. You might get a peek into it the same way a DJ mixes together other people's music, but nobody would call them a famous musician (not a great comparison, because there are famous, successful, and talented DJs). Also in terms of understanding a culture a lot of that is formed/built in the language. The phrases and structures of a language definitely have an impact on how people think.
So basically yeah, professional business translators and translator shops will probably go way down in business. They would be seen as some kind of luxury, but language learning as a hobby/to understand a culture isn't related to professional translating at all really.
As an aside, computers aren't really leveraged in mathematics much, outside arithmetic. I've (badly) done some final year undergraduate maths, and found myself still having to jump through algebraic hoops, rather than focusing on the big picture.
I am teaching myself statistics at the moment, and once I learn an equation, I let a CAS do it for me. Again, I am trying to use tools to take care of the lower level details - it's not really useful to do hairy integrals by hand when that's not that point or the level of what you are learning. At least that's my feeling.
Communicating face-to-face directly is still valued in business, even though we could replace such discussions with e-mail or IM. Humans value the direct and "emotional" connection that talking facilitates. Like intonation, facial expressions, word use etc. It's not the same if they speak to me through a speech recognizer + machine translator + text-to-speech synthesizer pipeline.
http://i.imgur.com/NQvJ6bK.png
Left side is human translation, right side is Google:
http://i.imgur.com/bYJDHhs.png
The loss of information is minimal, and mistakes are very tolerable. Funnily, the biggest ones are already underlined by Chrome spell checker.
update: I'm trying it with my commit logs (English -> Turkish and German) and the results are amazing.
Some people are fearing that this means now there is no need for language learning. But I see it differently, it's like how Wikipedia/Internet opened doors of knowledge to all people who are "interested" in knowledge. Now with this tool, we have a door opened to learning other language right from within our home.
The only nagging feeling is all this is google, with google becoming more-and-more evil, this is scary.
Part of this seems to be whatever is used to train the systems - going between English and Russian, for example, is not very good; my colleagues are all native Russians and can tell when I robo-translate versus when I manage to cobble together my own Russian sentences with frightening accuracy. In playing around with Google Translate and Yandex Translate, the programs seem to do really well on well known Russian texts, like famous Russian literature, while churning out some real goofy sentences in both languages when using more modern or lesser known prose.
All that being said though, I am very impressed as to how well and fast the robo-translators work. My job allows me the chance to work with people from virtually every country in Europe and Asia; our official support language is English, but pretty commonly the person best suited to be discussing the technical issues our clients need support on aren't great or comfortable with English. Quite a few times though we've been able to make it work by having remote sessions and going back and forth with Google Translate (or Yandex) in the browser while we dealt with the issues. As long as we keep the sentences relatively simple, it works well enough, and it makes the clients so happy to be able to just write in their native language and be understood. The translations may not be perfect, but I do think it's really cool that we can at least get a functional conversation going with the translate tools.
So yeah, robo-translate is pretty nice - I wouldn't say it's good for learning though; right now it's more functional than educational.
For German, there are tons of extensive reading resources (AKA "graded readers") and tons of podcasts for students.
I got to around upper intermediate in another language last year, and found it much less useful at that point. I was able to spot bad grammar and translations myself - I was much better off picking individual words from the dictionary.
I then moved on to translating between Norwegian and English, both primary languages of mine (well, the latter for some 16 years), and was thoroughly impressed by the results as long as I stayed away from idioms - well, some. Try something a bit Aussie like "Up sh*t creek in a barbed wire canoe", and it'd fall flat on its face. Then, however it successfully mastered "Bedre med en fugl i hånden enn ti på taket" => "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush".
Overall, that's really quite amazing work that the team has put in.
I gained most of my knowledge from reading Das Amiga-Magazin, which I subscribed to for probably a decade. I was going to flunk before I started reading it, but ended up with nearly best grades (high school). It's surprising how actually wanting to read the subject matter can change things around.
Pretty bold claim
You mean it's not an enjoyable thing to work on such systems and at the first opportunity they run away?
My pet peeve: translators that tell you 'what they meant' instead of what they said.
But sometimes that's not necessary. A reference, guide or manual, for instance. A contract. A patent. Records of legal proceedings. Scientific/medical texts. Dozens/hundreds of examples where it's not necessary.
Fiction, that's another matter, but it doesn't account for anywhere near the majority of the world's $40bn annual spend on translation.
And if you like the original so much, you can always learn the language ;)
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/itadakimasu-meaning/
Thanks for the interesting read :)
If I break it up into 'ita daki masu' then Google Translate emits "I will start with you." Again, no idea if that's even close.
And I'm not talking about the grammar, but cultural references that can only be similarly expressed in translation if no matching idiom exists. An alternative strategy is to just use the original (potentially with an explainer, under creative license) assuming the reader is aware that this is a translation and the text is based in the source language's location/culture.
"It's raining cats and dogs" has an equivalent in most languages. "Lagom" in Swedish doesn't. You could say it's similar to the "itadakimasu" concept of 'being grateful'. It is often translated as 'enough', but even that is woefully lacking. "Itadakimasu" also falls under the sorry, no specific equivalent here banner since it is specific to JP culture.
What are you hoping to find from the individual words? The etymology of the word is described in the 'Itadakimasu History' section, with references to mountain tops, bowing, gratefulness. Are you looking for a single, one-size-fits all equivalent word? Are you looking to understand it's history, or how to use it? The article is pretty comprehensive. And let's bear in mind that we may be over-analysing. Thousands of Japanese 5 year olds probably said itadakimasu today without a thought.
And it's been an especially frustrating wait because whenever you mention how deep systems have made huge process on translation, someone will be sure to note that Google Translate produces total gibberish for Japanese-English and in general is pretty bad, and then you had to explain that as far as anyone knows, Google may be publishing papers on how RNNs translate great but that doesn't mean they've rolled them out to the public Google Translate yet, which looks like making excuses. Now we get to see a productized version of the RNNs out in the wild.
[Insert article about finding nonsense profound.]
The comment here disputes that Einstein would have meant consciousness:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Albert_Einstein#Einstein....
a) "the same consciousness from which they have arisen", or
b) "the same consciousness they have arisen from"
But either is still clumsy because of the repetition of "from" that they necessitate.
"Probleme kann man nie mit derselben Denkweise lösen, durch die sie entstanden sind."
"Problems can never be solved with the same way of thinking through which they have arisen."
Quite impressive, imho.
It's not like they'd let you register fuck.google.com either.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060114103656/http://www.fuckmi...