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You may be spot on :) http://daily.unitedlanguagegroup.com/stories/editorials/google-translate-adds-nmt-to-8-language-pairs-unveils-zero-shot-translation http:

by bwasti 9y ago

You may be spot on :) http://daily.unitedlanguagegroup.com/stories/editorials/google-translate-adds-nmt-to-8-language-pairs-unveils-zero-shot-translation http://daily.unitedlanguagegroup.com/stories/editorials/goog... “…a multilingual NMT model trained with Portuguese>English and English>Spanish examples can generate reasonable translation for Portuguese>Spanish although it has not seen any data for that language pair. We show that the quality of zero shot language pairs can easily be improved with little additional data of the language pair in question,” the paper states.

asveikau 9y ago
This is a weird thing because you'd be hard pressed to find two languages as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, and whatever this paper has to say on the topic it'd be inevitable that the English translation in the middle would be "lossy". I sometimes get disappointed when people suggest that machine translation is a substitute for actually learning the languages. It's true that we have limited time in our lives to study languages, and the machine translations can be a quicker way to get the gist, or possibly open some doors. But go much beyond that, like claims I sometimes see that you can wear AR goggles and suddenly communicate like a native, and you set unreasonable expectations. Or perhaps imagine a world where the way to read Shakespeare is to put it through a machine and it tells you, "statistically, Shakespeare meant to say this". Is that really reading it?
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Actually there are quite a few, if you include the variants spoken across the peninsula, Galician, Mirandese and Aragon are even closer to Portuguese than Spanish. :)
  - asveikau 9y ago
    Yep, I was aware of some of those, not trying to defame the good people of Galicia or anything, just trying to say that Iberian Romance languages are all pretty similar, and notwithstanding many exceptions the probability of easily finding nearly 1-to-1 translations of any given text is much higher than for English where you would inevitably lose more information in transit.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      I got the point, was just trying to be a bit funny. I imagine there are other languages around the world that share the same kind of similarities among themselves.
      - asveikau 9y ago
        My wife is Russian, and things she says about how Ukrainian sounds to her reminds me a lot of what Spanish speakers say about Portuguese. I don't know enough to say how similar that comparison is, but it passes the "neighboring regions that might have been more mutually intelligible 1000 years ago" test.
pjmlp 9y ago
As native Portuguese, my biggest beef with Google translate is that it cannot make heads or tails from Portuguese variants when translating. Same applies to other non-English languages, like Spanish and French, not sure how much this affects English variants as well. Most of the time one gets a translation that isn't fully correct from the point of view of how the language is actually used in a specific country, sort of mixing American and British English on the same sentence.

by bwasti 9y ago

asveikau 9y ago

This is a weird thing because you'd be hard pressed to find two languages as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, and whatever this paper has to say on the topic it'd be inevitable that the English translation in the middle would be "lossy". I sometimes get disappointed when people suggest that machine translation is a substitute for actually learning the languages. It's true that we have limited time in our lives to study languages, and the machine translations can be a quicker way to get the gist, or possibly open some doors. But go much beyond that, like claims I sometimes see that you can wear AR goggles and suddenly communicate like a native, and you set unreasonable expectations. Or perhaps imagine a world where the way to read Shakespeare is to put it through a machine and it tells you, "statistically, Shakespeare meant to say this". Is that really reading it?

pjmlp 9y ago
Actually there are quite a few, if you include the variants spoken across the peninsula, Galician, Mirandese and Aragon are even closer to Portuguese than Spanish. :)
- asveikau 9y ago
  Yep, I was aware of some of those, not trying to defame the good people of Galicia or anything, just trying to say that Iberian Romance languages are all pretty similar, and notwithstanding many exceptions the probability of easily finding nearly 1-to-1 translations of any given text is much higher than for English where you would inevitably lose more information in transit.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I got the point, was just trying to be a bit funny. I imagine there are other languages around the world that share the same kind of similarities among themselves.
    - asveikau 9y ago
      My wife is Russian, and things she says about how Ukrainian sounds to her reminds me a lot of what Spanish speakers say about Portuguese. I don't know enough to say how similar that comparison is, but it passes the "neighboring regions that might have been more mutually intelligible 1000 years ago" test.

pjmlp 9y ago

As native Portuguese, my biggest beef with Google translate is that it cannot make heads or tails from Portuguese variants when translating. Same applies to other non-English languages, like Spanish and French, not sure how much this affects English variants as well. Most of the time one gets a translation that isn't fully correct from the point of view of how the language is actually used in a specific country, sort of mixing American and British English on the same sentence.