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Google translates German “halb zwei” to French “deux heures et demie”: 1h off
- teniutza 9y agoDeepL[0] outputs the same. [0] https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator
- wibr 9y agoUm halb drei -> À trois heures et demie Um halb drei gehen -> Aller à deux heures et demie Um halb drei gehen wir -> A quatre heures et demie nous partons Um halb drei gehen wir ins Kino. -> A trois heures et demie nous allons au cinéma.
- wibr 9y agoFor DeepL: -> À trois heures et demie -> 14 h 30 du soir, -> À 14 h 30, -> On va au cinéma à 14h30. Correct for everything but the first, not sure why it added "du soir". For the a complete sentence "Um halb drei gehen wir." it's also correct ("On part à 14h30.").
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y agoAs far as I can tell it's _in_correct in every instance except the first: À trois heures et demie = À trois heures et demie Aller à deux heures et demie =\= 14 h 30 du soir [1] A quatre heures et demie nous partons =\= À 14 h 30 [2] A trois heures et demie nous allons au cinéma. =\= On va au cinéma à 14h30 [3] [1] misses the "to go" part and also gets the time of day wrong- which is important because it uses 24-hour clock notation (and so it's obvious that it has no idea what 14h30 means). [2] completely misses the action ("nous partons") and gets the time wrong ("quatre heures" is "four o'clock", not 14). [3] Still gets the hour wrong (14h30 to "trois heures", i.e. three). You'd certainly wouldn't want those translations to "help" you with your appointments in France, or Germany.
- wibr 9y agoI was only referring to the time. "halb drei" is two thirty, which usually means 14:30 unless you specifically say "in the morning". The action in [2] would probably be added if you add a full stop.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y agoThe time is also wrong, in three out of the four cases above.
- rconti 9y agoNo, the 3rd one is 4:30 not 14:30. Quatre, not quatorze.
- rconti 9y agoand the 4th one is 3:30. I'm also not sure why you introduced "afternoon" into this; it's not said anywhere and it's easier to understand the translation if you just pretend like this is all early in the morning.
- mhd 9y agoFor "viertel" (quarter), German itself isn't without its regional ambiguities, though.
- eru 9y agoThere are two different conventions, but I never saw any ambiguity: One convention is "viertel vor zwei" (13.45) / "viertel nach zwei" (14.15), the other convention popular in the east and southwest is "dreiviertel zwei" (13.45) and "viertel drei" (14.15).
- mh-cx 9y agoThe ambiguity comes from the problem, when talking to someone from “the other system“. I remember that my “viertel drei“ was misinterpreted as 15.15 by someone, who autocompleted this to “viertel nach drei“ following his system.
- eru 9y agoInteresting. I never had that problem. Some people can't tell the time in the 'other' system, but they always recognised that it's a system they don't know.
- fshkod2 9y agodumb machine learning.
- matt4077 9y agoI like to imagine this is just the algorithm picking up on cultural stereotypes.
- daveguy 9y agoNot familiar with either language. What are the English translations of these two phrases?
- LyndsySimon 9y ago"Halb zwei" is "half two". It means "1:30".
- daveguy 9y agoAhh and it's being translated to 2:30. Stark evidence that Google translate doesn't really "understand" anything yet.
- rvense 9y agoI don't think anyone would claim that it does, except maybe Google Marketing and a few blue-eyed computational linguists - who would probably do themselves a favour by focusing a little more on the linguistics of the endeavour. It is a text-to-text machine translation system. There is, as far as I know, no attempt at an internal representation of anything like semantics or knowledge about the world. They may have added some grammatical facts, but there is no model of the world and no notion of time like a person would use to make or understand statements in natural language. Case in point: The artifacts of the training processes behind machine translation systems like Google Translate cannot be used to generate sentences from pictures or notions or anything like that. What is happening is nothing like a human learning a language, or even a pair of languages. That's not to say it's not impressive, useful and important tech, mind, but it really does not do all of what it appears to do at first glance.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tirant 9y agoSame when translate it to Spanish: Dos y media. On the other hand, it is correctly translated to Dutch (half twee), and English (half past one). If you translate English to Spanish and French, then the correct time appears. On the other hand, from Dutch to Spanish/French, it does not know it's time, and does a literal translation -> half of two.
- teekert 9y agoInterestingly it does do the Dutch "half twee" correctly, to French and back. Moreover, halb zwei is translated to half twee and back normally. So there is no inter-dependency or translation "via English" or something.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- matt4077 9y agoTranslations: 1:30 and 2:30, respectively. Or, literally, "half two" and "two hours and half".
- wyldfire 9y agoTo help my fellow English-speakers: "halb zwei" ("half two") is the German idiom for "halfway [between one and] two o'clock" "deux heures et demie" ("two hours and one half") is a much better cognate for the English "half past two o'clock" We're all used to off-by-one and fencepost errors. To be honest, this is probably a less interesting one of Google translate's mistranslations. But it's one that's very mechanical and we would expect a machine to get something like this right.
- p49k 9y agoTo make things even more confusing, “half two” means 2:30 in the UK and Ireland.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yAnonymous 9y agoUnlike the German and French versions, that doesn't make any sense at all.
- ealexhudson 9y agoIt does. It's a contraction of "half-past two".
- barry0079 9y agoIt's a shortening of "half past two". Or half the hour past two of the clock.
- elthran 9y agoIt's a colloquial contraction of "half past 2". To me, the German makes no sense - half of 2 is 1. Agreed though that the French is the most easily understood internationally.
- netsharc 9y ago
- d__k 9y agoHere is what https://translate.yandex.com https://translate.yandex.com says: halb zwei -> une heure et demie (FR) halb zwei -> half two (EN)
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoMachine translation is so frequently and so badly wrong that it can't be trusted at all. I guess it keeps translators in a job when it can't even get basic things right, let alone complex translation.
- bapf 9y agoDepending on where in germany you are, this is actually correct. The term "halb zwei" can mean 13h30 or 14h30 depending on which region in germany the speaker originates from.
- Max_Mustermann 9y agoCould you mention in what regions it could mean 2:30? Never heard of it and a quick search on google ergab nichts. (edited)
- tom_mellior 9y ago[no longer relevant, parent was corrected]
- Max_Mustermann 9y agoYep, thanks, just corrected it.
- ramblerman 9y agoI wonder if this is just due to a lot of translated documents getting it wrong. And thus having mis-trained the ai.
- twright 9y agoMy go-to bad machine-learning translation is from Swedish "Män som hatar kvinnor" to "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". The correct translation is "Men who hate women" the book's original title. We can deduce why it picked up the wrong translation in that case, harder to say here.
- md_ 9y agoI have wondered if it's not an increasingly difficult problem for Google Translate that, as it becomes more popular, it is likely to see more and more training data which it itself helped generate.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- franze 9y agoi hate this kind of time communicating in austria there is "viertel zwei" - quarter two which in one part of austria (vienna) means 1:15pm (or 1:15am), in the other half (90% of austria) it is understood as 1:45pm (or 1:45am), sometimes as 2:15pm (or 2:15am) - but never as 1:15pm/am "viertel [vor/nach] zwei" - quarter [to/after] two. the [] are optional.
- StavrosK 9y agoWait, why does "viertel zwei" mean 1:15? What's "viertel eins"?
- ahoka 9y ago12:15 of course. The same logic applies in Hungarian.
- gpvos 9y agoViertel zwei = a quarter of the second hour has passed, i.e., it's 1:15. It's a logical extension of the standard-language "halb zwei". But note that this is only used and understood in some German-speaking regions, not all!
- RBerenguel 9y agoIt works the same in Catalan: un quart de dues is 1:15, as in "one quarter of the hour 2". If we go full into it, we have as valid and used constructs "un quart i mig de dues" for anything around 1:21-1:23 (one quarter and a half of 2, which would be 1:22.5)
- zwieback 9y agoWhen I first moved to Stuttgart I was confused by the Swabian "viertel" (quarter) and "dreiviertel" (three quarters). The first means quarter after and the second quarter before the hour.
- tom_mellior 9y agoWhere in Austria does "viertel zwei" mean 2:15? My impression was that the places that don't use the Eastern ("Viennese", if you will) system always explicitly use "viertel vor" or "viertel nach" (or "viertel über"), leaving nothing optional/implicit.
- dmtroyer 9y agoSuggest an edit.
- zwieback 9y agoGermans like to reference time relative to the half hour, e.g. "fuenf vor halb drei" for 2:25 or even "zehn vor halb drei" for 2:20, etc. Do other cultures do that? Also, google gets "fuenf vor halb drei" wrong but "fuenf vor halb zwei" correct, it seems pretty random. "Fuenf nach halb eins" is 1:35 instead of 12:35 and "fuenf nach halb drei" is 5:30 instead of 2:35!
- hrydgard 9y agoSwedish does it but only the five before/after half case, not 10. And generally no other number than five actually. Examples: "Fem över halv två (13:35)" or "fem i halv fyra (15:25)".
- vidarh 9y agoNorwegian too. Though other numbers than 5 but rarely more than 5 tends to be acceptable. E.g. "tre på halv fire" (15:27) works, but it's rare to use it to be more precise than with five. If you want to be that precise people are more likely to resort to saying the specific minute of the hour ("tre tjuesju" or "tre syv og tyve"; the latter is "old fashioned" and from Danish but still frequently used), alternatively with 15 instead of 3 if even remotely ambiguous.
- htssouza 9y agothe same problem for Portuguese...
- nraynaud 9y agoyou had to be better at school! (in France, the good students are sent to learn German as a third language, and the bad ones are sent to learn Spanish as a third language, knowing German is a marker of class)
- ArmandGrillet 9y agoI have studied in France and this is not true from my experience. Greek and Latin were and will be for the good students (Hollande removed that but it'll be back). The choice between German and Spanish is made by the parents except if there is a lack of German teachers.
- Momquist 9y agoI can confirm that in my generation, at least, learning German was seen as a more elitist choice than Spanish. Latin/Greek were optional and very few chose to study them. Ironically at the time I felt that Latin classes were easier, and even more interesting than modern languages, e.g.: we were reading already Cicero in our first year.
- soVeryTired 9y agoMaybe it's a timezone thing...
- gpvos 9y agohttps://www.xkcd.com/1883/ https://www.xkcd.com/1883/
- Grue3 9y agoEnglish to Russian is also wrong https://translate.google.com/#en/ru/Half%20past%20one https://translate.google.com/#en/ru/Half%20past%20one "Half past one" = 1:30 "Половина первого" ("half of the first") = 0:30
- lnx01 9y agoAfrikaans>English is also wrong: https://translate.google.com/#af/en/half%20twee https://translate.google.com/#af/en/half%20twee original af: half twee (01:30) incorrect en: half past two (02:30) correct en: half past one (01:30)
- Symbiote 9y agoOther common mistakes are with measurement units and currency. I often see things like "20 litres of fuel cost 300kr" translated to "20 gallons of fuel cost $300". I can't reproduce this in a short sentence, it tends to happen when I translate a large block of text.