Hacker News Reader

Comment by _-___________-_ | Hacker News Reader

Mostly Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese, and mostly business and lightly-technical text.

My observation of the failure rate (if you define failure as "meaning has been lost") is well above 80% with Google Translate for these languages and this type of text.

It's literally unusable because you have no confidence that the translation has not completely reversed or garbled the meaning of the text, and the failure mode is particularly unpleasant because you may be unaware that it has failed to translate correctly, since it produces text that appears to have meaning - just the wrong meaning.

View on HN

> It's literally unusable

It's not "literally unusable." Even for language pairs with poor translation, it considerably saves on manual translation time if you can have a translator look over sets of already translated (but lower-quality) sentences and correct those with errors.

Plus, there are actual studies out there comparing human translations to machine translations in a double-blinded evaluation by translators and the gap is not as high as your comment suggests.

For chinese-english (the other direction), bilingual evaluators have had difficulty differentiating between the machine translation and the human translation.

> For chinese-english (the other direction), bilingual evaluators have had difficulty differentiating between the machine translation and the human translation.

Having attempted to use CN->EN machine translation many times, I find this very surprising. Have you got a reference I can have a look at?

Kinda funny when people say "East Asia" it mostly means Japan and its isolationism, with China mixed in just to change the tone a bit. I don't find it offensive, just kind of funny/interesting.

Well, in the context of language it's a useful term because of the close relationship many east Asian languages have.

Do those languages really have that relationship? When I scratched surface of Chinese language in university it felt almost English written in Kanji. No resemblance to Japanese, and it even made the classical Chinese interpretation methods taught in Japanese education rather dubious to me.

Although they belong to historically disparate language families, modern Vietnamese and Japanese vocabulary both have significant influence from Chinese languages. I know little about Korean but I imagine it's the case there too.

Your comment about Chinese feeling like English written in Kanji is really interesting to me, perhaps it's a case of different perspectives - I tend to focus on grammar when learning a language, and so Chinese feels very different to English from my perspective.

Japanese and Chinese languages are not related by descent. They differ in many very basic ways.

But Asian languages are nevertheless related in more mysterious ways. Compare the intro to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainland_Southeast_Asia_lingui... :

> The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is a sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion.

In a European context, this is similar to the unusual closeness between the "unrelated" English and French, known to be due to intensive contact between the languages post-William-the-Conqueror. (In a world context, English and French are closely related regardless.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com