6 ms·

Can Google Help Translate a Classic Novel?

47 points by lermontov 10y ago

wccrawford 10y ago
Spoiler: No. A better title would have been, "How Google fails at translations". The piece is actually interesting to read if you're into either language translations or how Google does stuff that seems magical, but the clickbait headline isn't doing it any favors.
- sevensor 10y ago
  I'd say the answer was "yes" to "Can Google Help Translate," but decisively "no" to "Can Google Translate a Classic Novel?" The interesting thing to me is that Google can supply reliable translations of stock phrases, which helps the translator identify them. More unusual constructions stand out because the translation is nonsensical in context.
  - cfmcdonald 10y ago
    Not according to the author of the article: "No, Google Translate was in no way useful to my translation of the 1956 Argentine novel Zama: let's get that out of the way first thing."
    - lucozade 10y ago
      But that's just poor English on the part of the author. The question she was really answering was "Did Google Help Translate a Classic Novel?". To which the answer, in her case, was no. My guess is that that may be because she is fluent in Spanish and English and is a professional translator. For the rest of us mortals who do occasionally attempt to read classic works in their original language, the answer to the headline is often "Yes, though not particularly well, but better than me".
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  Hmm, So, the article notes that the Google translate of a challenging but not incomprehensible Spanish phrase hasn't improved in the four years the translator tested. I personally haven't noticed Facebook translate improve in any fashion over a similar period. Yet I had heard of translation as one of the triumphs of recurrent neural networks. It may well be that such translations are doing better on some metric in some competitions yet that such formal improvements aren't palpable to humans yet. I have read previously things about translation now no longer needing language experts - which seems to say that perhaps automatic translation hasn't improved but merely gotten cheaper. While this raises the "is this deep learning stuff hype?", I think AlphaGo shows that some deep learning stuff is pretty amazing. One might argue also that ConvNets have had the unambiguous triumphs which RNNs' triumph is a bit more ambiguous. I'd be curious how folks who actually create this this technology would view progress of this sort.
  - mattkrause 10y ago
    One scary thing I've noticed is that Google Translate has a new failure mode. While it used to return obviously incomprehensible gibberish when things went off the rails, it now sometimes returns something plausible but subtly incorrect. For example, it silently dropped the negation in a French -> English translation. Unfortunately, I can't remember the exact phrase but it was so semantically implausible--something like "regardless, we will be liable for any damages" that I went back and looked at the source text. It also sometimes replaces pronouns with oddly specific nouns: "He does X --> John does X" I assume these are both reflections of oddities in the training data.
    - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
      Reminds me of the photocopier that started changing numbers in documents it copied. http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...
      - mattkrause 10y ago
- edko 10y ago
  Following Betteridge's Law of Headlines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...), the answer has to be "no".
  - dimino 10y ago
    To extend this point further, editors aren't simply unaware of Betteridge's Law. A lot of the time, headlines like this are written specifically to evoke the "No" response, and to entice the reader into asking the question, "Why would anyone even make such an argument?"
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rabboRubble 10y ago
I find Google Translate good at translating sentence fragments but generally not full sentences. Also, any Google Translate Japanese to English translation is near jibberish.
- panglott 10y ago
  J>E is the worst, Spanish is also not great. Google Translate is especially bad in places where the speakers will assume their interlocutors will infer significant amounts of information from context—because Google Translate has not actual knowledge of the context.
  - yongjik 10y ago
    Japanese->English can't be "the worst", because I've seen Korean websites telling this one weird trick for better quality: "Translate Korean to Japanese first and then translate that to English, and the result is better than direct translation!" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ When I tried, it was more of a hit and miss, though.
mturmon 10y ago
What a beautiful sentence - and challenging.
danso 10y ago
The more I think about the difficulties of translation, the more I think that "Darmok" of Star Trek: TNG season 5, is the rule rather than the exception. Not only is it difficult to replicate the literal meaning of individual words and the structure of phrases, but it seems inextricably hard to replicate the sentiment and cultural context of words (nevermind idioms). The Olympics recently reminded me of this, when news orgs reported that Brazillians had a colloquial word -- jeitinho -- that could be roughly translated as "MacGyver-ism" [0]. But even that rough translation needs a translation for all native English speakers who were born in America after the 90s. Side note: The phrase "star-crossed lovers" is something that comes to mind that would be hard to translate. I threw it into Google Translate [1] and got "desventurados amantes", which I guess means "wretched lovers" (when I threw "desventurados" back into Spanish to English). Maybe a little gets lost in the translation, but at least Google Translate didn't return whatever the literal translation for "star" and "crossed" are. [0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-05/rio-olympic-ceremony-marks-festive-showing-of-brazil-cash-crunch http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-05/rio-olympi... [1] https://translate.google.com/#auto/es/star-crossed%20lovers https://translate.google.com/#auto/es/star-crossed%20lovers
- panglott 10y ago
  Human language is like a scaffold of metaphors, on upon the other. George Lakoff, of course, wrote the book on this.
- SilasX 10y ago
  This site [1] translates desventurado as "unfortunate, ill-fated", which is the same thing that the "star-crossed" metaphor is trying to convey [2] -- outside forces beyond their control are condemning their relationship. The "star" in context was recognized as controlling fate. I think it translation is lacking the poetic beauty of the original -- in being more literal -- but gets the meaning across. I couldn't find it quickly, but it looks like the professional Spanish translations refer to them lovers "with stars opposed" [3] ("enamorados con estrellas opuestas"). [1] http://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=desventurado http://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=desv... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star-crossed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star-crossed [3] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_y_Julieta#Tiempo https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_y_Julieta#Tiempo
vlunkr 10y ago
This is a perfect lesson in understanding the difference between computer and human intelligence. Google "knows" more languages than any human, and how to translate most words between languages, but when it comes to 1) parsing the meaning of the sentence and 2) bringing that into another language, it's generally pretty bad. It's no match for a person who speaks both languages adequately. EDIT: It's the type of thing that makes me not fear the threat of AI. Seems like we are still pretty far from HAL. Missed his 2001 launch window.
akeck 10y ago
Yes.... ish? I've done the following for French -> English on an essay: 1) Google translate all the single sentences or sentence fragments. Use an online dictionary when the answer looks odd. 2) Re-mangle the machine translated blocks into decent English. It mostly worked. Doing this process on a novel would hurt. ;-)
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Yes, but manual translation of a novel would also hurt ;-)
glibgil 10y ago
> Salí de la ciudad, ribera abajo, al encuentro solitario del barco que aguardaba, sin saber cuándo vendría. > I left the city and made my way downriver alone, to meet the ship I awaited without knowing when it would come. The human translation seems a little wrong to me. I'll argue for the following: I left the city, downstream, to the solitary meeting of the ship I awaited, not knowing when it would arrive. "encuentro" seems to be a noun here, therefore "meeting". "solitario" is an adjective and describes the "meeting", not the narrator's manner of leaving.
- tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
  I agree your translation is a lot closer to the original text, the original for example talks about a 'solitary meeting' with the ship, it does not say like in the translators' that the character got there alone, they could have gotten there with others and left them to wait for the boat alone for all the reader knows. As much as the sentence in the article is quite nice, it seems more of a reinterpretation of the original compared to an exact translation like yours.

47 points by lermontov 10y ago

Spoiler: No. A better title would have been, "How Google fails at translations". The piece is actually interesting to read if you're into either language translations or how Google does stuff that seems magical, but the clickbait headline isn't doing it any favors.

sevensor 10y ago
I'd say the answer was "yes" to "Can Google Help Translate," but decisively "no" to "Can Google Translate a Classic Novel?" The interesting thing to me is that Google can supply reliable translations of stock phrases, which helps the translator identify them. More unusual constructions stand out because the translation is nonsensical in context.
- cfmcdonald 10y ago
  Not according to the author of the article: "No, Google Translate was in no way useful to my translation of the 1956 Argentine novel Zama: let's get that out of the way first thing."
  - lucozade 10y ago
    But that's just poor English on the part of the author. The question she was really answering was "Did Google Help Translate a Classic Novel?". To which the answer, in her case, was no. My guess is that that may be because she is fluent in Spanish and English and is a professional translator. For the rest of us mortals who do occasionally attempt to read classic works in their original language, the answer to the headline is often "Yes, though not particularly well, but better than me".
joe_the_user 10y ago
Hmm, So, the article notes that the Google translate of a challenging but not incomprehensible Spanish phrase hasn't improved in the four years the translator tested. I personally haven't noticed Facebook translate improve in any fashion over a similar period. Yet I had heard of translation as one of the triumphs of recurrent neural networks. It may well be that such translations are doing better on some metric in some competitions yet that such formal improvements aren't palpable to humans yet. I have read previously things about translation now no longer needing language experts - which seems to say that perhaps automatic translation hasn't improved but merely gotten cheaper. While this raises the "is this deep learning stuff hype?", I think AlphaGo shows that some deep learning stuff is pretty amazing. One might argue also that ConvNets have had the unambiguous triumphs which RNNs' triumph is a bit more ambiguous. I'd be curious how folks who actually create this this technology would view progress of this sort.
- mattkrause 10y ago
  One scary thing I've noticed is that Google Translate has a new failure mode. While it used to return obviously incomprehensible gibberish when things went off the rails, it now sometimes returns something plausible but subtly incorrect. For example, it silently dropped the negation in a French -> English translation. Unfortunately, I can't remember the exact phrase but it was so semantically implausible--something like "regardless, we will be liable for any damages" that I went back and looked at the source text. It also sometimes replaces pronouns with oddly specific nouns: "He does X --> John does X" I assume these are both reflections of oddities in the training data.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    Reminds me of the photocopier that started changing numbers in documents it copied. http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...
    - mattkrause 10y ago
edko 10y ago
Following Betteridge's Law of Headlines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...), the answer has to be "no".
- dimino 10y ago
  To extend this point further, editors aren't simply unaware of Betteridge's Law. A lot of the time, headlines like this are written specifically to evoke the "No" response, and to entice the reader into asking the question, "Why would anyone even make such an argument?"

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

rabboRubble 10y ago

I find Google Translate good at translating sentence fragments but generally not full sentences. Also, any Google Translate Japanese to English translation is near jibberish.

panglott 10y ago
J>E is the worst, Spanish is also not great. Google Translate is especially bad in places where the speakers will assume their interlocutors will infer significant amounts of information from context—because Google Translate has not actual knowledge of the context.
- yongjik 10y ago
  Japanese->English can't be "the worst", because I've seen Korean websites telling this one weird trick for better quality: "Translate Korean to Japanese first and then translate that to English, and the result is better than direct translation!" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ When I tried, it was more of a hit and miss, though.

mturmon 10y ago

What a beautiful sentence - and challenging.

danso 10y ago

The more I think about the difficulties of translation, the more I think that "Darmok" of Star Trek: TNG season 5, is the rule rather than the exception. Not only is it difficult to replicate the literal meaning of individual words and the structure of phrases, but it seems inextricably hard to replicate the sentiment and cultural context of words (nevermind idioms). The Olympics recently reminded me of this, when news orgs reported that Brazillians had a colloquial word -- jeitinho -- that could be roughly translated as "MacGyver-ism" [0]. But even that rough translation needs a translation for all native English speakers who were born in America after the 90s. Side note: The phrase "star-crossed lovers" is something that comes to mind that would be hard to translate. I threw it into Google Translate [1] and got "desventurados amantes", which I guess means "wretched lovers" (when I threw "desventurados" back into Spanish to English). Maybe a little gets lost in the translation, but at least Google Translate didn't return whatever the literal translation for "star" and "crossed" are. [0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-05/rio-olympic-ceremony-marks-festive-showing-of-brazil-cash-crunch http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-05/rio-olympi... [1] https://translate.google.com/#auto/es/star-crossed%20lovers https://translate.google.com/#auto/es/star-crossed%20lovers

panglott 10y ago
Human language is like a scaffold of metaphors, on upon the other. George Lakoff, of course, wrote the book on this.
SilasX 10y ago
This site [1] translates desventurado as "unfortunate, ill-fated", which is the same thing that the "star-crossed" metaphor is trying to convey [2] -- outside forces beyond their control are condemning their relationship. The "star" in context was recognized as controlling fate. I think it translation is lacking the poetic beauty of the original -- in being more literal -- but gets the meaning across. I couldn't find it quickly, but it looks like the professional Spanish translations refer to them lovers "with stars opposed" [3] ("enamorados con estrellas opuestas"). [1] http://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=desventurado http://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=desv... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star-crossed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star-crossed [3] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_y_Julieta#Tiempo https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_y_Julieta#Tiempo

vlunkr 10y ago

This is a perfect lesson in understanding the difference between computer and human intelligence. Google "knows" more languages than any human, and how to translate most words between languages, but when it comes to 1) parsing the meaning of the sentence and 2) bringing that into another language, it's generally pretty bad. It's no match for a person who speaks both languages adequately. EDIT: It's the type of thing that makes me not fear the threat of AI. Seems like we are still pretty far from HAL. Missed his 2001 launch window.

akeck 10y ago

Yes.... ish? I've done the following for French -> English on an essay: 1) Google translate all the single sentences or sentence fragments. Use an online dictionary when the answer looks odd. 2) Re-mangle the machine translated blocks into decent English. It mostly worked. Doing this process on a novel would hurt. ;-)

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Yes, but manual translation of a novel would also hurt ;-)

glibgil 10y ago

> Salí de la ciudad, ribera abajo, al encuentro solitario del barco que aguardaba, sin saber cuándo vendría. > I left the city and made my way downriver alone, to meet the ship I awaited without knowing when it would come. The human translation seems a little wrong to me. I'll argue for the following: I left the city, downstream, to the solitary meeting of the ship I awaited, not knowing when it would arrive. "encuentro" seems to be a noun here, therefore "meeting". "solitario" is an adjective and describes the "meeting", not the narrator's manner of leaving.

tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
I agree your translation is a lot closer to the original text, the original for example talks about a 'solitary meeting' with the ship, it does not say like in the translators' that the character got there alone, they could have gotten there with others and left them to wait for the boat alone for all the reader knows. As much as the sentence in the article is quite nice, it seems more of a reinterpretation of the original compared to an exact translation like yours.