21 ms·
Found in translation: More accurate, fluent sentences in Google Translate
- chappi42 10y agoWorks great. Thank you Google!
- pmyjavec 10y agoYou're welcome, chappi42
- drcode 10y agoI can confirm: I took some of the most difficult text I could find (some articles from lesswrong.com) and translated them from English to German with Google... the German translation is very close to perfect now- Comparable to any manual translation I could do on my own, being fluent in both languages.
- arcticfox 10y agoI'm not sure if the Portuguese->English translation just isn't as good as English->German, but it's certainly nowhere close to a fluent manual translation. In fact, the main difference seems to be less tripping up on mostly inconsequential small pieces of English grammar. It seems to have the same trouble as the old version in translating the meaning of sentences.
- tauchunfall 10y agoI tested a douzen sentences (English to German with texts from lesswrong.com) and it is very good, but not very close to perfect; I could spot a minor error in nearly every sentence. EN: As we wrap up the 2016 survey, I'd like to start by thanking everybody... DE: Als wir die Umfrage 2016 abschließen, möchte ich zunächst allen danken... EN: This seems consistent with the hypothesis that the LW community hasn't declined in population so much as migrated into different communities. DE: Dies scheint im Einklang mit der Hypothese, dass die LW-Gemeinde nicht in der Bevölkerung sank so viel wie in verschiedene Gemeinden abgewandert.
- superplussed 10y agoAs a student of the German language, it'd be interesting to know the errors in the sentences.
- singularity2001 10y ago'Als' Is not used in that way. 'Da / Während / Nun, da ' would be more acceptable, 'So' maybe. As a student -> Als student OK As I drove -> Als ich fuhr OK past tense As I start -> Da ich anfage, so ich anfage, während ich ... I think it's more practical for Germans to adopt the English usage then for you to learn this strange exception;)
- awild 10y agoThe first sentence is probably better started with "Zum Abschluss" than "Als wir abschliessen". The second sentence is not wrong per se, I am having trouble coming up with a better translation. I'd probably use Communities instead of Gemeinden, as Gemeinde is more municipality or parrish, and the original sentence refers to online communities, which for me are not entailed in Gemeinde(in this context at least).
- bergjs 10y ago"Als" is not correct here. It should be "Da wir die Umfrage 2016 abschließen ..." In the second example it should be "... dass die LW-Gemeinde in der Bevölkerung nicht sank sondern eher in verschiedene Gemeinden abgewandert ist." But I'm having a hard time translating "so much as" in this context to German.
- MagnumOpus 10y ago"Not X so much as Y" is pretty much always be translated as "Nicht X sondern Y". "Sondern" should be used here.
- lorenzhs 10y agoI'd suggest something like this: "Zum Abschluss der Umfrage 2016 möchte ich zunächst Ihnen allen danken". Note the "Ihnen", which isn't there in English but required for an idiomatic translation. "Dies scheint im Einklang mit der Hypothese, dass die LW-Gemeinde nicht in der Bevölkerung abgenommen hat, sondern eher in andere Gemeinden abgewandert ist". Note that the "not so much" qualifier is applied to the first half in English, but the second half in German ("sondern eher" → "but rather").
- koyote 10y agoI don't think I agree with 'very close to perfect'. Just entering a random sentence I got the following: Humans are far better than other species at altering our environment to suit our preferences. Die Menschen sind weit besser als andere Arten bei der Veränderung unserer Umgebung, um unsere Vorlieben. The German is pretty much wrong and the actual meaning of the original sentence is hard to deduce in my opinion. That being said, computer translation has come very far in the last decade.
- vumgl 10y agoEven though I appreciate the quality of the new translation, on the translation example on the image with the 2 phones, I find the old translation more insightful (even if not grammatically correct) than the new one. I.e. I prefer: "No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that they have arisen" to "Problems can never be solved with the same way of thinking that caused them"
- tiglionabbit 10y agoI vastly prefer the second one. Perhaps you like the first because it uses fancier words? But it's very hard to understand what it means. [Insert article about finding nonsense profound.]
- adiabatty 10y agoOdd. I think the latter is much clearer, at least out of context.
- maxerickson 10y agoWe just need someone who speaks fluent Einstein to stroll by and tell us. The comment here disputes that Einstein would have meant consciousness: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Albert_Einstein#Einstein.27s_.27No_problem.27_quote_out_of_context https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Albert_Einstein#Einstein....
- SilasX 10y agoThe first one still needs tweaks, to be perceived by a native speaker as fluent: either a) "the same consciousness from which they have arisen", or b) "the same consciousness they have arisen from" But either is still clumsy because of the repetition of "from" that they necessitate.
- cperciva 10y agoI agree, this seemed like a poor choice for demonstrating the improvements in translation. I would personally translated it as "No problem can be solved via the same manner of thinking as caused them".
- jgable 10y ago(Very) Long term, it will be interesting to see what happens when everyone is carrying Google Babelfish around with them.
- DonaldFisk 10y agoNot so long ago there was AltaVista Babelfish, which has been now replaced by Bing Translator. I don't know if they trademarked the name.
- Hnrobert42 10y agoI'll be interested to see the effect on Vietnamese-English when it rolls out. Currently, it's so bad as to be almost unusable.
- ageitgey 10y agoIf you are interested in how neural translation systems like this work and how they are different than the previous statistical systems, check out https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-part-5-language-translation-with-deep-learning-and-the-magic-of-sequences-2ace0acca0aa https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-part-5-...
- KennyCason 10y agoThis is an excellent read. I highly recommend to other HNers here.
- vilhelm_s 10y agoSo one thing I wonder about is how well "smoothness" of the translated text reflects accuracy of the translation. What I mean is, we already know several really impressive examples of how language models from recurrent neural networks can generate eerily natural random texts (e.g. this blogpost http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/) So even if we just trained it on an English corpus and fed random numbers into it, it would still output smooth and natural-sounding English sentences. Of course, here it is actually translating, but I wonder how often it will be "overconfident", i.e. generate a plausible-sounding sentence which doesn't at all correspond to the input text. Unlike a human translator, it won't say "sorry I'm not sure what that means".
- glandium 10y agoSince they listed Japanese in the list of languages, I went ahead and took the first news on yahoo japan, which was translated to: "Government and ruling parties will raise the upper limit of the annual income (under 1,300,000 yen) of spouses subject to deduction to 1.3 million yen or 1.5 million yen, over the review of spousal deduction, which is the focus of the tax reform debate focused on in the 2017 tax reform debate I entered the adjustment with the plan. If the annual income of each husband exceeds 13.2 million yen (11 million yen for "income" minus the amount deemed necessary expenses for work), 11.2 million yen (9 million yen same), it is excluded from the system. The ruling party taxation study committee will review these two plans and aim to include it in the tax reform outline of FY2005" Seems like there's still a long way to go. (Copy/pasted original text: ２０１７年度の税制改正議論で焦点となっている配偶者控除の見直しを巡り、政府・与党は、控除対象となる配偶者の年収上限（１０３万円以下）を１３０万円か１５０万円まで引き上げる案で調整に入った。それぞれ夫の年収が１３２０万円（仕事の必要経費とみなされる額を差し引いた「所得」では１１００万円）、１１２０万円（同９００万円）を超える場合は制度の対象外とする。与党税制調査会はこの２案を軸に検討し、１７年度税制改正大綱に盛り込むことを目指す) I wonder how it went from １０３万円以下 to "under 1,300,000 yen"
- DonaldFisk 10y agoI've tried translating some paragraphs from English to Japanese and back and it now seems intelligible enough to be useful. Previously, it produced complete gibberish. The mistake you pointed out seems rather odd. Computers are supposed to be good at arithmetic. With my limited knowledge of Chinese (that part is all Kanji) even I would get that right (under 1,030,000JPY). But that's the problem with neural or statistical translation - even with the code available, you can't easily tell why it's happened. Perhaps it got confused because １３０万円 appears later in that sentence.
- cynix 10y agoIt also translated １７年度 as "FY2005". I guess it thought it was H17, even though 2017 appeared earlier in the text.
- hasenj 10y agoActually the English translation seems to produce surprisingly well formed sentences. I'm not a native English speaker, and these kinds of long winded sentences with numbers in them are always confusing, but at least I don't see any _obviously_ malformed phrase.
- Yodoshi 10y agoFind it really interesting that Google Cloud Platform customers get access to this immediately. Bodes well for Google cloud, putting out your latest and greatest eases my thoughts as to whether its a first class citizen within Google. (I know the head of the Cloud unit is on Google's board which was a major sign of taking 'cloud' seriously.)
- demircancelebi 10y agoI just tested English to Turkish, works surprisingly well, congrats Google! Wondering when Babelfish will be available :)
- dfgonzalez 10y agoAm I the only one surprised, and disgusted, about the .google TLD?
- Terribledactyl 10y agoThis has been a long time in the making, https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/expanding-internet-domain-space.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/expanding-internet-d...
- piyush_soni 10y agoWow. I didn't even notice it didn't have a .com at the end of "blog.google". I have no idea what's so 'disgusting' about it though.
- dfgonzalez 10y agoSimple: I just don't see the point on using these new TLDs, they are confusing, it's not clear how the work and stupidly expensive... Seems just as an snobby thing.
- cooper12 10y agoBecause we (not we as in the people but ICANN or whoever's in charge) are allowing corporations to use trademarks as top level domains. While before the top level domains belonged to countries or were general, now they can also be populated by those rich enough. Personally I see it as brands encroaching on a previously "public" space. Would Google allow me to register fuck.google or anything that could damage their brand? I highly doubt it. I wouldn't find it so bad if any joe schmo could create their own TLD, but this is an instance of allocating address space to the most powerful and letting control it as free advertising. It's not a technical problem by any means, but I see it as a moral one.
- trentmb 10y ago> Would Google allow me to register fuck.google or anything that could damage their brand? I highly doubt it. It's not like they'd let you register fuck.google.com either.
- malloryerik 10y agoWow I looked at this between Korean and English -- it's very impressive. Amazing, in fact, b/c Korean and Japanese seem to be the hardest to get right(?). There were inaccuracies but in the past even getting the gist of something was difficult. I then tried translating newspaper text from Korean to French, but that was making far more mistakes... Also, going from English to Korean is better but, for example, "I'll go nuts" turns into "I'll bear fruit" (나는 열매 맺을거야) and so on. And of course the social / honorific stuff can't be conveyed yet. But it's head and shoulders over the previous versions. Amazing. A bit frightening. Just reading Korean is really hard for me b/c I'm not Korean... so this should help. It might not help my Korean language skill, though... or will it? Of course it also tends to devalue my skill of reading in Korean... or does it?
- sharpy 10y agoThat example aside, as a native speaker, I've found the English-to-Korean translation to be rather good!
- kwillets 10y agoI put in a few sentences, and it seems much better. It seemed to have trouble rearranging words and phrases over long distances (due to grammatical differences) before.
- malloryerik 10y agoSo what does this mean for language learning? In one sense, calculators and computers haven't made learning arithmetic and other math less important. On the contrary. Maybe in a similar way, by increasing the amount of communication between speakers and writers of different languages, tools like this might actually make language learning _more_ important? Or is that an interesting thought but completely wrong? Perhaps speaking and listening will gain in importance while writing and reading will decrease? Or is it not worth the time and trouble to learn another language anymore? A penny for your thoughts. (OK, not a real penny ;)
- emodendroket 10y agoI don't know about language learning but I think this stuff is going to relatively soon put even more translators out of work.
- pmyjavec 10y agoActually, this tech could actually be a serious setback for language learning and communications in general. It's amazing how many people have taken the time to learn English around the world, which has made business and traveling easier. Will there still be interest and investment in learning one of the biggest languages in the world, if you can just use translate.google.com? I hope not personally, but it does make me wonder if this will put things back somewhat as we get complacent and lean on technology to translate for us.
- malloryerik 10y agoRight, that's exactly what I wonder about. It would be a sad irony if universal translation made us _less_ cosmopolitan. Then again, what about the calculator analogy? I'm sure that when calculators came out, some people must have thought it was the end of arithmetic studying, for example. And, I can do calculus with a machine, but more people study calculus now than ever before. Maybe languages are no different?
- unclenoriega 10y ago
- emodendroket 10y agoWelp, glad I abandoned my ambitions in Japanese translation to write software instead.
- luxpir 10y agoThe translation industry is $40bn/pa and growing at some 13% pa. Demand for human translation might well rise alongside these innovations as awareness of the benefits and ROI of good translation spreads. But software's a good bet too ;)
- emodendroket 10y agoProbably the trend of using translators to edit machine translations will accelerate, but I can't see that as really of benefit to the individual translator.
- luxpir 10y agoDefinitely post-editing will continue. I was mainly talking about the market itself growing, with the assumption that a large portion of that market will demand high-quality, human translation of marketing copy, instructions and legal texts.
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- nharada 10y agoIt seems that production versions of these cutting edge techniques come out very soon after the paper is released (in this case just a few months). I wonder how long the internal development process for these big ML efforts are.
- gwern 10y agoI'm not sure this is all that soon. The first paper using RNNs in an encoder-decoder framework from Hinton et al which blew the top off of phrase-based systems' BLEU scores was back in... 2013? It's been a long time. And it's been an especially frustrating wait because whenever you mention how deep systems have made huge process on translation, someone will be sure to note that Google Translate produces total gibberish for Japanese-English and in general is pretty bad, and then you had to explain that as far as anyone knows, Google may be publishing papers on how RNNs translate great but that doesn't mean they've rolled them out to the public Google Translate yet, which looks like making excuses. Now we get to see a productized version of the RNNs out in the wild.
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- colordrops 10y agoI tried some Chinese news sites, and more than one paragraph was translated to English perfectly. Very impressive. But my Chinese wife asked me to put in some text from Weibo, China's Twitter clone, and the translations were nearly incomprehensible. She insisted that the samples we chose were not slang but were everyday colloquial Chinese that is easily understood by anyone. My guess is that Google's training set is mainly Chinese news sites, which are a formal type of Chinese that is quite different from spoken Chinese. I wonder if they can scrape Weibo messages to improve their translations.
- bhrgunatha 10y agoThat's been my experience, colloquial use has always been dreadful often to the point of being unintelligible even when you know the context.
- Houshalter 10y agoChinese is the hardest language to translate. Or at least according to their statistics: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jOLa-LdidQU/V-qV2oJn1aI/AAAAAAAABPg/-6OhKKPhxT89Vs9HhyKMEnyG_0ncWGjJQCLcB/s1600/image00.png https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jOLa-LdidQU/V-qV2oJn1aI/AAAAAAAAB... Human translations of chinese, are rated worse than old google translations of other languages.
- krzyk 10y agoIt's a pity that this graph shows only 3 languages (except for English), I would love to see such graph for all the languages available in google translate.
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- luke_s 10y agoI tried with some facebook comments and articles posted to facebook in chinese and the results were pretty much incomprehensible as well. It was so bad, it makes me wonder - has google actually enabled this for all users?
- paulftw 10y agoStupid question: when they say 8 languages including Chinese - do they mean Mandarin or Cantonese? Or is that the same thing (for them)?
- bumblebeard 10y agoThey mean Mandarin. There have been rumblings in the past that Cantonese support might be coming though.
- schoen 10y agoIt might be a challenge for Google to find big corpora to train on because of the somewhat restricted contexts Written Cantonese has been used in (but more power to them if they can make it work!).
- sundvor 10y agoMy German (3rd language) is rather horrid, but I thought I'd try with "Es gibt mich Schadenfreude". In return I got "It gives me pleasure". Well, yes, but.. :-) I then moved on to translating between Norwegian and English, both primary languages of mine (well, the latter for some 16 years), and was thoroughly impressed by the results as long as I stayed away from idioms - well, some. Try something a bit Aussie like "Up sh*t creek in a barbed wire canoe", and it'd fall flat on its face. Then, however it successfully mastered "Bedre med en fugl i hånden enn ti på taket" => "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush". Overall, that's really quite amazing work that the team has put in.
- 50CNT 10y agoJust in case you care, it is "Es gibt mir Schadenfreude", and "Es macht mich schadenfreudig".
- sundvor 10y agoAh, thanks! Yes, I do. I was 50/50 between mir and mich there.. Couldn't quite remember the use cases. Really ought to refresh my skills a bit, perhaps by finding some good German C# /asp.net tech sites to peruse. I gained most of my knowledge from reading Das Amiga-Magazin, which I subscribed to for probably a decade. I was going to flunk before I started reading it, but ended up with nearly best grades (high school). It's surprising how actually wanting to read the subject matter can change things around.
- 50CNT 10y agoThat's how I learned English. Hung around on IRC a lot.
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- tmptmp 10y agoI may sound over optimistic but I feel this is very good for people who are interested in learning new languages. It will surely help people learn many languages with relative ease and low cost. Anyone can try out various sentences from new target language (e.g. German) and at least get a near-enough meaning from google. I can try many variations in simple sentences and get a good start, without having to rely on some human help, which is very costly in terms of money and (more importantly) time. A human teacher will get bored with me asking hundreds of variations to translate for me, but not computer. This is great, at least for me. Some people are fearing that this means now there is no need for language learning. But I see it differently, it's like how Wikipedia/Internet opened doors of knowledge to all people who are "interested" in knowledge. Now with this tool, we have a door opened to learning other language right from within our home. The only nagging feeling is all this is google, with google becoming more-and-more evil, this is scary.
- csydas 10y agoI think it may assist with languages within the same language families, but robo-translate for those not with the same language family it's still pretty far off. I still wouldn't rely on it for anymore more than a general idea of translations, as often the robo-translate misses really important contextual items or mistranslates or doesn't handle different grammatical structures well. You'll get the general gist or overall concept, but the sentences require a lot of interpretation since they're not really proper sentences in the native language, they're just intelligible. I'm not really sure it'd be a good learning resource aside from "what is this word in [language]?" or getting the written form of common phrases. You'll get something passable, and a native speaker willing to listen or read will probably understand, but it isn't proper most of the time. Part of this seems to be whatever is used to train the systems - going between English and Russian, for example, is not very good; my colleagues are all native Russians and can tell when I robo-translate versus when I manage to cobble together my own Russian sentences with frightening accuracy. In playing around with Google Translate and Yandex Translate, the programs seem to do really well on well known Russian texts, like famous Russian literature, while churning out some real goofy sentences in both languages when using more modern or lesser known prose. All that being said though, I am very impressed as to how well and fast the robo-translators work. My job allows me the chance to work with people from virtually every country in Europe and Asia; our official support language is English, but pretty commonly the person best suited to be discussing the technical issues our clients need support on aren't great or comfortable with English. Quite a few times though we've been able to make it work by having remote sessions and going back and forth with Google Translate (or Yandex) in the browser while we dealt with the issues. As long as we keep the sentences relatively simple, it works well enough, and it makes the clients so happy to be able to just write in their native language and be understood. The translations may not be perfect, but I do think it's really cool that we can at least get a functional conversation going with the translate tools. So yeah, robo-translate is pretty nice - I wouldn't say it's good for learning though; right now it's more functional than educational.
- seesomesense 10y agoI am trying to learn Finnish and I have found that the colloquial, literary and poetic registers of Finnish are poorly translated.
- woodruffw 10y agoI'm excited to see if these changes trickle down to the Latin model, which has seen improvement over the years but at a pace slower than non-dead/historical languages.
- batmansmk 10y agoThe french translation is pretty bad. The funny thing to try is to double translate english => french => english and compare both texts. If the results are way off, you know the translation is incorrect.
- tener 10y agoNot necessarily: languages are ambigous by nature.
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- planetjones 10y agoSo for German: Our baby is due in January. goes to Unser Baby ist im Januar fällig My German colleagues assure me Google's neural network needs a bit more training on that one. I often use Google Translate to go back from the German I have (badly) created to English, as a further check that it's somewhat understandable. In terms of it replacing asking real humans for help... I think it's still a long way away, but good to see Google investing in it.
- bergjs 10y ago> Unser Baby ist im Januar fällig Freely translated: "Our baby is going down in January."
- mda 10y agoIn my tests it gave better results for longer sentences with more context.
- lorenzhs 10y agoIt clearly failed on context there - "fällig" does mean "due", but when referring to an invoice. "due" isn't used for baby delivery dates in German, the sentence would be structured differently, probably something like "Unser Baby kommt im Januar" (literally "our baby is coming in January"). That's exactly the kind of thing I hoped this new model would catch, but apparently that's still a bit too much to expect.
- anselm_eickhoff 10y agoThis one is actually not too bad - there is only a very slight difference between "due" (which can mean both something like "shall be done" and "bound to happen") and "fällig" (which means only "shall be done"). Grammatically and semantically, this almost never matters, it only misses the much higher cultural context of it being slightly weird to refer to a baby as a "task".
- detaro 10y agoAt least it's clearly understandable and grammatically correct, and only a slightly odd (distant) phrasing. I wouldn't be surprised at all if I heard someone saying it exactly like that in an off-the-cuff remark. Interestingly I wouldn't know how to translate the German back to English while preserving the feel of the phrasing. Languages just don't map 1:1.
- WalterBright 10y agoIt's still a ways from becoming self aware. Here's a piece of an old family letter in German: Meine lieben Kinder! Sveben brachte Frl. Moldelen die Rarte von Herrn Thomass mit du schoene Nachricht, dass R. doch endlich gut in Br. ankam. Was bin ich froh daruber! Und nun hoffe ich doch schr, dess Roesi Samstag mittag in R. ankem, sich schrubben u aus schlafen konnte. Dickes, hast Du Dir nichts gehalt bei der Rums Scheru? Mittwoch ging ich nach Tisch zur Stadt, be- sorgte Einiges u wollte im Hansahed in der Wilm. Str. haden. Musste aber 2 1/2 St. werde, dann war es aber sehr schoen. Ich mechte dann das Abendessen u erst um 8 h ging ich rauf ins Zimmer zum Tisch decken de fand ich den Zettel von Frl. B. mit Frl. Mol. dehns grusse von Dir! Meinen Schrucke koemmt Ihr Euch denken. My dear children! Sveben brought Ms. Moldelen the Rarte From Mr. Thomass, with a nice news, That R. finally got well in Br. What I'm glad about it And now I hope Schr, dess Roesi Saturday noon in R. ankem, Could scrub u from sleeping. Thick, You have nothing to do with the Rums Scheru? Wednesday, I went to the city, Caused some u wanted in the Hansahed in the Wilm. Str. Had to be 2 1/2 St., Then it was very beautiful. I want to Then the dinner u went around 8 h I rise up into the room to cover the table I found the note of Miss B. with Miss Mol. Dehns greetings from you! My shrine You think.
- lorenzhs 10y agoWell but that letter has several errors ("mit du schoene Nachricht", "schr" instead of "sehr", "ankem" is ancient spelling for "ankam", "be- sorgte" was a hyphenated line break...) and uses weird abbreviations that require context (R. is a person, Br. is a place). No wonder it's having trouble.
- WalterBright 10y agoThank you for the corrections. I haven't been able to talk any native German speakers into helping fix the errors. In general, though, I've found Google Translate to fall over and produce gibberish with a single misspelling or grammatical error. That's ok when translating professionally edited text, but language in common usage tends to be a lot messier.
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- sidcool 10y ago> With this update, Google Translate is improving more in a single leap than we’ve seen in the last ten years combined Pretty bold claim
- michael_h 10y agoGoogle Translate is arguably improving substantially with this update. The state of machine translation in general has already been better than Google Translate. The problem with the bleeding-edge systems is that they are not well distributed, no thought has been given to UX/UI, and the people who created them just want to finish their thesis and get out. Also, speed - the systems that eke out another few extra percentage points on accuracy tend to hoover up the CPU cycles, crushing their business case.
- laacz 10y agoWhen I read something about google translate (related to Latvian or not), there is a certain phrase I love testing - "Hard rock fan". There were times when it was translated literally - "a fan, manufactured from solid rock" (cieto iežu ventilators). Then for a brief moment it was translated as originally intended. Now, however, it translates to nonsense ("hard rock ventilators"), which losely may be translated back to English as "Hard rock fan", where "fan" refers to that thing which moves air around. However, an article from Latvian news site was translated to English unexpectedly good. Which was not the case for English to Latvian translation, sadly. But it makes some kind of point if we consider English as lingua franca.
- personlurking 10y agoLet's try (Brazilian) Portuguese: "Google e Facebook declararam guerra aos sites de Internet que difundem notícias falsas, que o buscador e a rede social vão impedir que se beneficiem de seus serviços de publicidade." "Google and Facebook have declared war on Internet sites that broadcast fake news that the search engine and social network will prevent them from benefiting from their advertising services." _____ After the comma (which Google misses in its English translation), the word "que" (that) should be translated as "which" in this case. Also, the reflexive "beneficiar-se" (to benefit onself, used here in the imperative/command tense) seems to have confused Google, likely due to having missed the comma earlier. I took out the middle part of the second clause and translated only "que vão impedir que se beneficiem" and Google got it right, translating it as "which will prevent them from benefiting". I have experience translating from BR-PT to EN (and even vice-versa for my own testing), and BR-PT native speakers have a habit of writing long-winded, run-on sentences in all sorts of published literature. I'm curious to see Google understand that aspect, which even trips me up once in a blue moon.
- meirelles 10y agoI'm a Portuguese native speaker. I saw a clear improvement, but I noticed errors to identify who is the subject of the context. Unlike English which the subject always is explicit (repeating a lot the pronouns I, you, they, e etc) in Portuguese we normally omit. Is quite challenging for a machine understand that.
- mbrookes 10y ago"once in a blue moon" That feels like the wrong idiom in this context, just "once in a while" sounds better. But I couldn't decide why it sounded wrong, so I googled "once in a blue moon". I didn't arrive at a conclusion, but: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=once+in+a+blue+moon https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=once+in+a+blue+moon "once in a blue moon = 1.16699016 × 10-8 hertz" Huh?!
- derkha 10y ago> 1.16699016 × 10-8 hertz IOW, once every 2.7 years. Google Calculator is genius.
- baybal2 10y agoWow, something that is actually useful came out of that neural network thing at Google
- Grue3 10y agoJapanese translation has improved recently but it still often generates pretty silly results. Though this language is one big Winograd schema so it would be hard to improve without strong AI. Shameless plug for my own Japanese translation service http://ichi.moe http://ichi.moe which doesn't even attempt to build a sentence and relies on the user to solve ambiguity.
- merastius 10y agoSpeaking of Winograd Schema, it seems to manage some pretty simple cases, which I thought was pretty cool. No idea if it could already do that before this update, though. It correctly translated "I asked my son to take my bag because it was very heavy" and "I asked my son to take my bag because he was very strong" correctly from French, despite the 'he/it' both being the ambiguous 'il' in French.
- egeozcan 10y agoI'm amazed with the improvement in Turkish. Here's an example: http://i.imgur.com/NQvJ6bK.png http://i.imgur.com/NQvJ6bK.png Left side is human translation, right side is Google: http://i.imgur.com/bYJDHhs.png http://i.imgur.com/bYJDHhs.png The loss of information is minimal, and mistakes are very tolerable. Funnily, the biggest ones are already underlined by Chrome spell checker. update: I'm trying it with my commit logs (English -> Turkish and German) and the results are amazing.
- afsina 10y agoOne thing about Chrome spell checking; it uses a form of stem-ending dictionary for Turkish and does not perform actual morphological analysis. So sometimes legit words will be marked as mistakes. Such as the one in your example "yuvarlamaktır"
- egeozcan 10y agoYes, indeed. Just a weird but funny coincidence in this case.
- _samihasan_ 10y agoIf they manage to reach 99% translation accuracy of German texts, I say they achieved a very remarkable feat. I know that Modern Standard Arabic is not supported yet with the NML system but I just went and tried the translation for a small excerpt from an article on DW [1] "بالرغم من عدم وجود تأكيدات رسمية منها على نيتها للترشح مجددا، قال قيادي بارز في حزبها إن المستشارة ميركل ستترشح لولاية رابعة. جاء ذلك على لسان المسؤول عن لجنة العلاقات الخارجية في البرلمان الألماني نوربرت روتغن. " "Despite the lack of official confirmation, including the intention to run again, a senior leader of her party said that Chancellor Merkel will stand for a fourth term. This came on the tongue in charge of the Foreign Relations Committee in the German Parliament Norbert Rongn." Of course, the translation is not perfect but good enough. However, I believe that they could do better by working on their Arabic text-to-speech synthesizer and having a toggle option for diacritics that would definitely help them with the synthesizer as there are many words pronounced wrong or actually very wrong that's disappointing. All in all, great work by the people at Google Translate. [1]: http://www.dw.com/ar/%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%8A-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%B2-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%AD%D8%B2%D8%A8-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%B4%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%B1%D9%83%D9%84-%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%AA%D8%B1%D8%B4%D8%AD-%D9%84%D9%88%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B9%D8%A9/a-36404882 http://www.dw.com/ar/%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%8A-%D8%A8%D...
- jbrazile 10y agoEnglish to German still has room for improvement. At first I was offended but then I realized he was just pulling my leg. He smiled and said, "I'm just yanking your chain." She added, "Don't mind him, he's always rattling someone's cage." Zuerst war ich beleidigt, aber dann merkte ich, dass er gerade mein Bein zog. Er lächelte und sagte: "Ich zerrle gerade deine Kette." Sie fügte hinzu: "Kümmern Sie sich nicht um ihn, er ist immer rasseln jemandes Käfig."
- pantalaimon 10y agoIt honestly sounds like something Krautchan or /r/de would write (Zangendeutsch)
- novalis78 10y agoGerman to English works amazingly well... I was able to fool it the other way round though. Here some crazy German sentences and the English version: "Das altbacken emotionale Muster einer zerstoerten Ehe aehnelt dem Neutrino-sturm eines sterbenden Gasgiganten" -"The old-fashioned emotional pattern of a ruined marriage resembles the neutrino storm of a dying gas giant" (In the above I tried to confuse it using archaic words mixed with completely disconnected topics in the same sentence while still being grammatically correct.) "Das verrueckte an der Sache ist der enorme Unterschied zwischen digitalem Denkmuster und analogem Sachverstand" - "The crazy thing about this is the enormous difference between digital thought patterns and analogous expertise" Beautiful! [Disclaimer: studied linguistics]
- amelius 10y agoSo, what kind of algorithms are they using? References to literature welcome.
- dyoo1979 10y agohttps://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144 https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144, as well as the References section at the bottom of: https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for...
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoI'm not a fan of translating the 'meaning' instead of the actual wording. You lose idiom, phrasing, even the poetry. Its like I won't understand what they said, so it gets dumbed down. Like talking to a child. My pet peeve: translators that tell you 'what they meant' instead of what they said.
- dagw 10y agoI friend of mine who works as a translator said that the hardest thing for him to learn was to translate a badly written sentence in the original into to an equally badly written sentens in the target language. The first couple of books he translated he kept getting into trouble for trying to improve the author's language and punctuation.
- luxpir 10y agoIt's absolutely possible to retain idiom, phrasing and even the poetry of a text, all while retaining meaning. Particularly if the source and target languages are culturally and linguistically similar. In fact you have to, as the translation has to retain the original meaning. The tradeoff is in not losing the above. But sometimes that's not necessary. A reference, guide or manual, for instance. A contract. A patent. Records of legal proceedings. Scientific/medical texts. Dozens/hundreds of examples where it's not necessary. Fiction, that's another matter, but it doesn't account for anywhere near the majority of the world's $40bn annual spend on translation. And if you like the original so much, you can always learn the language ;)
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoWell for instance, I was trying to find out what "itadakimasu" says (which many Japanese persons say before eating food prepared for them). Its almost impossible to get a literal translation from anybody (including Google Translate, which says Let's Eat).
- luxpir 10y agoNot sure if Google Translate is the best research tool for an archaic idiom... Duckduckgo threw up this: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/itadakimasu-meaning/ https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/itadakimasu-meaning/ Thanks for the interesting read :)
- bluesilver07 10y agoI translated this line from the New York Times - "The dismissals followed the abrupt firing on Friday of Gov. Chris Christie" to Tamil. It translated "firing" as துப்பாக்கி சூடு (Gunfire). Maybe it needs to infer the contextual meaning from the earlier word "dismissals"?
- antaviana 10y agoEnglish>Tamil is not one of the language pairs of the new neural engine.
- starbucksswa 10y agoTurkish-English one is nearly perfect. Well done Google
- sho_hn 10y agoThis might create a new problem: Without obvious mistakes like word salad, you can no longer evaluate the probable quality of a translation. You might read a translated news article and be oblivious to missing or mistranslated facts, because the text flows well and sounds convincing. The old method had telltale signs of breakdown and the resulting text was always clumsy enough to warn anyone off with regards to trusting it too much. Hmmm. Interesting times.