Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

For some language pairs, maybe. The problem is that as you translate between more distant languages, you find that something which is contextual in one language is textual in the other, and vice versa.

The neural networks are great at faking it, and they'll make up text that looks completely reasonable all day long. If that means inventing subjects and choosing random verb tenses, that's what they'll do. If you pick closely-related languages, you might be able to get a near perfect translation just by putting each word through a dictionary, and the neural networks can disambiguate things and smooth over the problems in the output by looking at local context. If you pick distantly-related languages, you might routinely need context from paragraphs away, or context which isn't present in the text at all but relies on some kind of human experience.

View on HN

> more distant languages,

low resource translation is definitely still bad, you're right.

> near perfect translation just by putting each word through a dictionary, and the neural networks can disambiguate things and smooth over the problems in the output

Funnily enough, this is not a terrible explanation of how the current sort of approaches to low-resource MT work.

>> more distant languages,

> low resource translation is definitely still bad, you're right.

No, you've misunderstood. Languages that are closely related to each other are fairly easy to translate between. Languages that aren't related are not, regardless of whether you have a large corpus to work with. English - Mandarin is not an example of "low resource translation".

> Languages that aren't related are not, regardless of whether you have a large corpus to work with

The size of the corpus makes a huge difference. I don't see how can both be true that a. there is this massive failure of translation engines on these language pairs,

b. human translators were unable to differentiate between human translated chinese-english sentences and machine translated sentences.

It's not incredible - but it's also not awful or unusable.

> It's not incredible - but it's also not awful or unusable.

If your use case is (1) being vocally excited about machine translation, or (2) having fun in your spare time, then machine translation is good enough for you.

If you have a genuine need to know what something in a foreign language says, machine translation is unusable.

This isn't really a good usability profile.

We successfully use it in production at the company I work for, so this is just (1) not true, (2) an ill-informed opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com