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Comment by jquery | Hacker News Reader

Deepl is a better option. It feels several years ahead of Google Translate in quality. I know enough Japanese to hurt myself, and Deepl is definitely giving the superior translations, by far, which is great for my studies. As an analogy, it’s like going from 144p to 360p (a good human translation ranges from 720p to 4k+). Yeah 360p video is still blurry but it’s in a different league than 144p.

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The problem with machine translation is not the obvious general mediocrity, but the occasional undetected catastrophic failure, especially in medical context. I don't think DeepL (or any other fully automated system) is any more reliable in this sense.

Can any automated solution be reliable enough? I don't think so unless you can prove it does less harm than a professional medical translator.

We should pay more for translators. But translation is an area where people like to cut costs. The translation industry simply doesn't pay enough to attract the volume of people required, at the level of skill required. And with machine translation getting better, not worse, I don't see this trend reversing without regulation... even if machine translation is still nowhere near human level.

Mediocre human translation can be catastrophically wrong as well. Mediocrity just isn't good enough when a mistake can cost someone's life. The worse the translator (machine or human), the more catastrophic mistakes it makes per 1000 lines of text. If a professional human translator isn't available, it makes sense to use the best alternative available. Deepl has a free web interface.

Sometimes Google translate is better. Sometimes it's the same. Sometimes both fail to translate correctly. DeepL is only better on average. I've found deepl to leave out sentences from the source text and sometimes it gets bugged and starts translating inaccurately and you have to refresh the page.

I find Deepl to be far superior to Google Translate.

The key is of course to use grammatically correct, unambiguous language to begin with.

If it's electronic communication, you can always reverse the translation to check it translates back to your original.

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