5 ms·

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 tra

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
      Wow. That must have been absolutely maddening to discover.
  - vintermann 10y ago
    It's not a new failure mode, it has always done that.
- soperj 10y ago
  I'd say that the fact that AlphaGo can play games against itself and there's a clear determiner what makes something successful(ie: a winning strategy), allows it to improve on it's own. I can't think of a way in which you could do this with language without having a human determine whether the output was readable/understandable or not.
  - dmreedy 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?"

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
    Wow. That must have been absolutely maddening to discover.
- vintermann 10y ago
  It's not a new failure mode, it has always done that.
soperj 10y ago
I'd say that the fact that AlphaGo can play games against itself and there's a clear determiner what makes something successful(ie: a winning strategy), allows it to improve on it's own. I can't think of a way in which you could do this with language without having a human determine whether the output was readable/understandable or not.
- dmreedy 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?"