Comment by tmptmp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmptmp | Hacker News Reader

I may sound over optimistic but I feel this is very good for people who are interested in learning new languages. It will surely help people learn many languages with relative ease and low cost. Anyone can try out various sentences from new target language (e.g. German) and at least get a near-enough meaning from google. I can try many variations in simple sentences and get a good start, without having to rely on some human help, which is very costly in terms of money and (more importantly) time. A human teacher will get bored with me asking hundreds of variations to translate for me, but not computer. This is great, at least for me.

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.

I think it may assist with languages within the same language families, but robo-translate for those not with the same language family it's still pretty far off. I still wouldn't rely on it for anymore more than a general idea of translations, as often the robo-translate misses really important contextual items or mistranslates or doesn't handle different grammatical structures well. You'll get the general gist or overall concept, but the sentences require a lot of interpretation since they're not really proper sentences in the native language, they're just intelligible. I'm not really sure it'd be a good learning resource aside from "what is this word in [language]?" or getting the written form of common phrases. You'll get something passable, and a native speaker willing to listen or read will probably understand, but it isn't proper most of the time.

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.

You're way better off just doing some reading (and listening to podcasts/radio if you can find materials easy enough). You'll get correct input, you'll learn things that aren't translations of things you would already say in English and you'll pick up more of the culture.

For German, there are tons of extensive reading resources (AKA "graded readers") and tons of podcasts for students.

Google translate for me is good in the pre-intermediate stage of learning. You can shove in groups of words and it's a nice heuristic. But I always keep in mind that it's likely to fall apart on longer sentences - I use it to "Fill the gaps" in grammatical constructs I know. It's a great enabling technique

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.

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