Comment by glandium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by glandium | Hacker News Reader

Since they listed Japanese in the list of languages, I went ahead and took the first news on yahoo japan, which was translated to:

"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"

Actually the English translation seems to produce surprisingly well formed sentences. I'm not a native English speaker, and these kinds of long winded sentences with numbers in them are always confusing, but at least I don't see any _obviously_ malformed phrase.

There are passages that just make no sense to me in English.

"(...) 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.

> 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.

The original text states ２０１７年度.

So it does. Never mind.

I dunno, that's still more readable than most humans can muster.

But incorrect to the point of completing lying about dates is pretty bad.

To answer your questions:

>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?

---

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.

それぞれ夫 is literally each husband. While the introductory sentence uses the gender neutral 配偶者 (Spouse), this sentence actually does appear to make the assumption that husbands are the ones claiming the deduction and not wives (which is probably true in 90% of cases).

> それぞれ夫 is literally each husband.

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 actually think this update is now worse for at least Japanese -> English. The sentences it produces are now often much more readable, and much more wrong. Without some background in the language there is no way for the user to tell; previously where it lacked a match it would produce a translation that made it obvious it wasn't able to grok the meaning, now it seems to 'fill in the blanks' in a way that makes the sentence readable in English regardless. I guess this is much like a non-skilled human translator, but given the assumption that Google knows all this gives a false impression of the accuracy. It would be really helpful I think if Google Translate would provide some kind of confidence level on its accuracy for a translation - a bar graph, stars, something...

Phone typing has created a similar problem just within English. Typos are easy to interpret, and virtually never affect the meaning of a phrase. Random word substitutions are much harder, and are quite likely to make the phrase in which they appear into complete nonsense.

I've tried translating some paragraphs from English to Japanese and back and it now seems intelligible enough to be useful. Previously, it produced complete gibberish.

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.

It also translated １７年度 as "FY2005". I guess it thought it was H17, even though 2017 appeared earlier in the text.

It translated okay for me, perhaps you meant 130万?

> 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.

When I try, "１０３万円以下" on its own translates to "below 103 million yen", and when it's part of the whole passage it's "under 1,300,000 yen".

In either case it's wrong.

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