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Comment by englishrookie | Hacker News Reader

Based on just a few exchanges in Dutch (I'm a native speaker), I'd say it's pretty good. The conversation sounds pretty natural (albeit shallow). Maybe the quality differs per language?

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Dutch is a sister language of English so I’m not surprised

Believe me, if I the syntax in Dutch would keep, get you a very strange result. (This is a literal translation of a correct Dutch sentence.)

Translation or transliteration?

No transliteration: Dutch uses the Latin alphabet.

Maybe word for word translation is the phrase we're looking for? As opposed to an idiomatic translation. Transliteration means phonetically translating from one alphabet to another, in order to p reserve the pronunciation.

Exactly this — I thought that’s what “transliteration” meant, but I was wrong. I appreciate the pointer.

Thanks, I didn’t realize that I’ve been using that word incorrectly. I should have said ‘literal translation’.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_translation

> Believe me, if I the syntax in Dutch would keep, get you a very strange result. (This is a literal translation of a correct Dutch sentence.)

Of course there are differences, but both Dutch and English are West Germanic languages (descended from proto-Germanic) whereas Portuguese is a Romance language (descended from Latin).

Here is a handy tree showing how various languages are related to each other:

https://d1sjtleuqoc1be.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/201...

Such a tree mostly describes word similarity. But translating words is not what an AI (or more generally a computer) has problems with.

It's word ordering and idioms where AIs stand or fall. Things that show very little correlation in the evolution of language.

> Such a tree mostly describes word similarity.

It describes genetic descent.

Very valuable insight - I am sure the Dutch speaker you’re informing had no idea what Romance languages are

Yoda was Dutch?

He does live in a swamp, so he could be an ancestor

Yes exactly. Currently there are slight quality differences depending on the chosen language. We're working on improvements in all languages.

What translator do you use? If it's any other than DeepL, you're making a mistake!

I tried it out in both Dutch (fluent) and Swedish (native speaker). The Dutch seemed fine. In Swedish most of it was perfectly ordinary Swedish except one response seemed like awkwardly translated English.

Yeah it's highly dependent on the language right now

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