5 ms·

Actually the English translation seems to produce surprisingly well formed sentences. I'm not a native English speaker, and these kinds of long winded sentences

by hasenj 10y ago

Actually 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.

glandium 10y ago
There are passages that just make no sense to me in English. "(...) which is the focus of the tax reform debate focused on in the 2017 tax reform debate I entered the adjustment with the plan." Where does "I" come from? What's the part of the sentence that follows it supposed to mean? "If the annual income of each husband exceeds 13.2 million yen" each husband? "FY2005" That one is funny, it translated １７年度 as meaning 平成１７年 (17th year of Heisei era, which is 2005) when what's meant is 2017.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  > That one is funny, it translated １７年度 as meaning 平成１７年 (17th year of Heisei era, which is 2005) when what's meant is 2017. Yeah, but that's totally plausible unless you know this is a text from 2016.
  - mrpopo 10y ago
    The original text states ２０１７年度.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      So it does. Never mind.
- duaneb 10y ago
  I dunno, that's still more readable than most humans can muster.
  - hueving 10y ago
    But incorrect to the point of completing lying about dates is pretty bad.
- getoj 10y ago
  To answer your questions: >Where does "I" come from? The system has lost track of the subject (the government and ruling party) and put in "I" as the most likely candidate. This error is pretty dumb, to be honest, and no halfway competent human would make this mistake. >What's the part of the sentence that follows it supposed to mean? "entered the adjustment with the plan" is for ～案で調整に入る, which is quite difficult political lingo. The sentence should begin "the government and ruling party have entered discussions regarding (two different) proposals to raise the ..." >each husband? "Each" should be "[under] each plan"; the original omits the subject. Figuring out the meaning of それぞれ here would be hard for a lot of quite advanced Japanese learners, I think. >funny, it translated １７年度 as meaning 平成１７年 Actually this is the more common interpretation - if it didn't say 2017 earlier in the text this would be a pretty safe bet. I guess they don't do text-level analysis yet? --- Anyway, I agree with what everyone else is saying - this is an impressive leap in making intelligible output for JtoE, but as a translator I'm not fearing for my job just yet.
- bluehex 10y ago
  それぞれ夫 is literally each husband. While the introductory sentence uses the gender neutral 配偶者 (Spouse), this sentence actually does appear to make the assumption that husbands are the ones claiming the deduction and not wives (which is probably true in 90% of cases).
  - glandium 10y ago
    > それぞれ夫 is literally each husband. When taken out of context, that would be true. That's however not the case in the original full text. See getoj's sibling reply. It would be clearer if there were a comma between それぞれ and 夫, though, but I don't know if that's my French bias wanting punctuation or if that would be "idiomatic".
yborg 10y ago
I actually think this update is now worse for at least Japanese -> English. The sentences it produces are now often much more readable, and much more wrong. Without some background in the language there is no way for the user to tell; previously where it lacked a match it would produce a translation that made it obvious it wasn't able to grok the meaning, now it seems to 'fill in the blanks' in a way that makes the sentence readable in English regardless. I guess this is much like a non-skilled human translator, but given the assumption that Google knows all this gives a false impression of the accuracy. It would be really helpful I think if Google Translate would provide some kind of confidence level on its accuracy for a translation - a bar graph, stars, something...
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  Phone typing has created a similar problem just within English. Typos are easy to interpret, and virtually never affect the meaning of a phrase. Random word substitutions are much harder, and are quite likely to make the phrase in which they appear into complete nonsense.

by hasenj 10y ago

glandium 10y ago

There are passages that just make no sense to me in English. "(...) which is the focus of the tax reform debate focused on in the 2017 tax reform debate I entered the adjustment with the plan." Where does "I" come from? What's the part of the sentence that follows it supposed to mean? "If the annual income of each husband exceeds 13.2 million yen" each husband? "FY2005" That one is funny, it translated １７年度 as meaning 平成１７年 (17th year of Heisei era, which is 2005) when what's meant is 2017.

emodendroket 10y ago
> That one is funny, it translated １７年度 as meaning 平成１７年 (17th year of Heisei era, which is 2005) when what's meant is 2017. Yeah, but that's totally plausible unless you know this is a text from 2016.
- mrpopo 10y ago
  The original text states ２０１７年度.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    So it does. Never mind.
duaneb 10y ago
I dunno, that's still more readable than most humans can muster.
- hueving 10y ago
  But incorrect to the point of completing lying about dates is pretty bad.
getoj 10y ago
To answer your questions: >Where does "I" come from? The system has lost track of the subject (the government and ruling party) and put in "I" as the most likely candidate. This error is pretty dumb, to be honest, and no halfway competent human would make this mistake. >What's the part of the sentence that follows it supposed to mean? "entered the adjustment with the plan" is for ～案で調整に入る, which is quite difficult political lingo. The sentence should begin "the government and ruling party have entered discussions regarding (two different) proposals to raise the ..." >each husband? "Each" should be "[under] each plan"; the original omits the subject. Figuring out the meaning of それぞれ here would be hard for a lot of quite advanced Japanese learners, I think. >funny, it translated １７年度 as meaning 平成１７年 Actually this is the more common interpretation - if it didn't say 2017 earlier in the text this would be a pretty safe bet. I guess they don't do text-level analysis yet? --- Anyway, I agree with what everyone else is saying - this is an impressive leap in making intelligible output for JtoE, but as a translator I'm not fearing for my job just yet.
bluehex 10y ago
それぞれ夫 is literally each husband. While the introductory sentence uses the gender neutral 配偶者 (Spouse), this sentence actually does appear to make the assumption that husbands are the ones claiming the deduction and not wives (which is probably true in 90% of cases).
- glandium 10y ago
  > それぞれ夫 is literally each husband. When taken out of context, that would be true. That's however not the case in the original full text. See getoj's sibling reply. It would be clearer if there were a comma between それぞれ and 夫, though, but I don't know if that's my French bias wanting punctuation or if that would be "idiomatic".

yborg 10y ago

I actually think this update is now worse for at least Japanese -> English. The sentences it produces are now often much more readable, and much more wrong. Without some background in the language there is no way for the user to tell; previously where it lacked a match it would produce a translation that made it obvious it wasn't able to grok the meaning, now it seems to 'fill in the blanks' in a way that makes the sentence readable in English regardless. I guess this is much like a non-skilled human translator, but given the assumption that Google knows all this gives a false impression of the accuracy. It would be really helpful I think if Google Translate would provide some kind of confidence level on its accuracy for a translation - a bar graph, stars, something...

thaumasiotes 10y ago
Phone typing has created a similar problem just within English. Typos are easy to interpret, and virtually never affect the meaning of a phrase. Random word substitutions are much harder, and are quite likely to make the phrase in which they appear into complete nonsense.