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Comment by nom | Hacker News Reader

I'm not even half through this article but I felt an urge to say this: The automatic french-english translation is so good, I didn't even notice it at all. Good work, google!

Edit: now that I'm aware that the text I'm reading is a translation, I see the errors. I guess my brain just filtered it out. Still awesome though!

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Beware the translation in some places. Google translates: "Une policière engueule une femme dont le garçon de trois ans court dans tous les sens" into "A police officer beats a woman whose three-year-old runs in all directions". The actual translation is: "A female police officer shouts at a woman whose 3-year-old is running all over the place"

> The actual translation is: "A female police officer shouts at a woman whose 3-year-old is running all over the place"

"Berates" feels much closer than "shouts at", "engueuler" is not just general shouting there's a strong component of scolding to it.

Also "policewoman" if you want to carry gender across the translation, but I'd say "police officer" is just fine, french requires gendering, english does not.

I am not that good in English so for me shouts at was good enough ;)

Gender is important when we talk about "beating" people though.

I was reading it in English when I read that line and thought that didn't seem right. I mean, that would have been the title of the article.

I think "berate" is unnecessary: in the context the type of shouting is completely clear, and "engueuler" is used much more commonly than "berate" so IMO using it would be to change the tone without improving the meaning.

Wow you are right. Given your example, Google Translate doesn't recognize the gender of the police officer at all. It didn't even get "sens" correct, it translated it to "means" instead of "direction" until I told it the correct translation.

> Given your example, Google Translate doesn't recognize the gender of the police officer at all.

Or it did and did not care, "police officer" is a perfectly valid translation for "policière", French is a highly gendered language, English significantly less so.

Well, to be fair, the language used is rather simplistic. The vocabulary itself is of a higher level, but the grammar is really basic from the start to the end. Most of the article is also pure description and not a thesis or something. I guess all that helps a lot the automated translation tool.

Good to know, it makes a lot of sense. What do you think, was it written by a non-native speaker or is it comparable to something you find in a french newspaper?

The original article, in French, is very well-written; the grammar didn't strike me as "basic", but rather the writing of someone used to getting messages across clearly. Largely on par with most articles in French newspapers. That said, the automatic translation holds up pretty well, except for some gender issues and mistranslation of colloquialisms.

The author is an experienced academic historian and hence the language is precise, perfectly formed and persuasive. Google Translate does indeed do quite well. Where GT fails is in colloquial context sensitive language, like IRC or facebook, where it is terrible.

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