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Comment by baguasquirrel | Hacker News Reader

It's scary what you can do with machine translation these days...

That's incredible. When I read the article I didn't realize I'm reading google translated version, so I thought "Igor's english is a bit broken but relatively good". I only realized I read a translation when you pointed it out. I went back to re-read the original (I'm a native russian speaker) and it's amazing how close google got to expressing the essence of every sentence.

Not only is the translation of a surprisingly high quality, but reading the original in Russian is more awkward since a lot of the technical terms are originally English. I needed to read a particular portion 3 times before I realized it meant memory allocation.

I though the same thing. I learned all the tech terms in English, so when I read "sborka musora" instead of "garbage collection" it somehow makes me smile.

Funny how it changed:

    for (int i = 0; v8::V8::IdleNotification() && i < 3; i++);

to:

    for (int i = 0; v8:: V8:: IdleNotification () & & i <3; i + +);

He probably should've wrapped this bit in code tags.

Edit: By 'code tags' i mean literal <code> tags.

Not sure what you mean; it was in a <pre> tag.

Maybe a <code> tag, which is actually a semantic element?

Technical texts like this are relatively easy to get right. English is not my native language and when I was young I could read computer related stuff, but had trouble understanding, for example Harry Potter. If Google has an example of such a text, they can learn all the translations for all the technical terms from that data. However, a news article is much more difficult because they often have lot's of metaphors, etc. If you try to translate those, you get a lot of halve finished sentences and stuff like that.

Seriously.. I didn't even realize that was a translation till I finished the first paragraph.

that or we have bad grammar sentences, sometimes.

Indeed. However though Google translate quite correctly from most common languages to English, translation to other languages (even English to French or English to Spanish) often hardly makes any sense.

Haha, I thought your reply was talking about how the V8 engine worked(translating to machine specific code), instead of the language translator used on the blog post.

It likely was not completely translated by machine. Google Translate lets anyone reading the translation edit it to fix errors. Highlight some text and notice the link that appears allowing you to "Contribute a better translation" for that particular passage.

It's more likely that it only helps train Google Translate, and doesn't actually apply any changes directly to the translated text. Otherwise vandalism would be way too easy.

Why on earth is the comment by Pooter dead?

Because they were hellbanned 72 days ago for no obvious reason, every contribution of theirs is DOA.

Look at Pooter's comment history. He/she has been banned for some reason.

Yeah, I actually found it so good it was distracting. After every sentence I kept going back and saying, "Wow, I can't believe it got that right too".

The thing that led me to it was halfway through, when I moved the cursor on top of the text and there was some popup, at which point I yelled, WTH is that crap site with some broken JS advertising! I moved the mouse away but kept moving it in by pure reflex. It took me a whole minute to realize it was Google Translate.

Before I actually noticed that, "snapshot'ov" actually made me laughed, genuinely (mis)taking it for some sort of pun.

I thought exactly the same thing!

I still remember being able to play a game with one of my friends where we'd translate a sentence to German then back to English and laugh at how mangled it was…

http://www.translationparty.com/#9269521

After a bunch of English/Japanese translations:

"Number of games: We, and I have learned how to use the means for translating the German text in English is still a way of encoding their friends to play with a smile. .."

really good translation. i'm not aware google translate has this progress.

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