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Google Translate didn't use deep learning until less than a year ago: https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for...

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That's why it got that much better. Before it was barely usable, now it is positively stunningly good (with the occasional booboo but if they keep improving at the present rate that will become quite rare in another 3 to 5 years).

It's also stunningly poor in lots of cases. Largely because the system has no idea of the reality it's talking about.

Yeah, the differences are kind of interesting -- check out the last section of this article http://legendsoflocalization.com/funky-fantasy-iv/ for some comparisons of Google-translated Japanese text from Final Fantasy IV before and after the switch.

Thats fascinating how you can see the rules based formalism of version 1 translate go wrong in very different ways from the ML pattern matching version 2. ML creates a grammatical but nonsensical sentence from which little or no original meaning can be recovered. As someone in Japanese translation makes me feel better about my job.

> Before it was barely usable, now it is positively stunningly good

That varies a lot by language. I keep finding its attempts at Polish painfully bad, and I only know a little Polish myself.

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