Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

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I wanted to translate the Dutch text under the source Video for my fellow-HN'ers but Google translate can actually do a pretty decent job! So for your convenience here is the text as translated by Google (and proof read by a native Dutch speaker):

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GRONINGEN - An electric car, a Volkswagen ID 3, caught fire at the Helper Brink in Groningen at the end of the morning on Saturday. The driver had just put her child in the car and wanted to get behind the wheel herself. She took the charging plug out of the car for a moment. Then the car started smoking. She quickly got her child out of the car and brought herself to safety. The flames quickly spread from the car and 911 was called. The fire brigade rushed to the rescue but was unable to save the vehicle. The car burned out completely and there was little left of the car that was towed by a recovery company. A car parked next to this car was also damaged by the fire. The cause of the car fire is not yet known, but it is believed to have a technical cause.

Proofreading from natives is sometimes all we need. It is sad how much amazing content we miss because of being only available in Russian, Deutsch, German, Spanish, etc.

DeepL has been a blessing for this. While at least for German it tends to use rather formal language sometimes, it's far better than Google translate and generally reliable enough to not require a native to check it.

Ha, I used DeepL for translating to French once and it translated "best regards" to something like "I hope the president of the EU will find this all in accordance" or something similar to that. I presume it was because most European language models were trained on UN and EU documents that are made available in tons of languages.

I've learned to throw the output of any machine translated text into a reverse machine translator and see if the text still makes sense. For non-European languages, I just assume the translated text is flawed but will hopefully get the message across well enough.

I've translated quite a few things I've written in Dutch to English with both DeepL and Google Translate as a matter of experiment, and didn't really find either of them better. Sometimes DeepL gets it better, but other times Google Translate gets it better; this can differ per sentence. I couldn't really determine one was significantly better than the other.

oh, wow! You even converted 112 to 911. Nice touch :-)

Fun fact: if you're going to pick a number to use in an emergency, you should nearly always use 112 if you don't know the local number for the specific service you need. In theory, it will work on any GSM carrier as it's part of the GSM standard, and certainly does throughout North America and Europe despite many countries in these regions more commonly listing other emergency numbers. According to Wikipedia, it's an nearly universal alternate number across the other continents as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112_(emergency_telephone_numbe...

112 actually works in the US too, on mobile phones anyway, as it's part of the GSM standard; it just gets forwarded to 911. It should work pretty much world-wide.

Does it also work the other way around? If not, then US citizens are disadvantaged when abroad.

Evidently a translation to American English! In the UK we'd call it 999, though 112 does work too.

Wouldn't you call 0118 999 881 999 119 7253 these days[0] ;-)?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWc3WY3fuZU

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