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This seems like an example of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Translation without any loss of veracity is extremely difficult, even for human tran

This seems like an example of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Translation without any loss of veracity is extremely difficult, even for human translators, and failure to clear that bar doesn't constitute nonsense. If instead we consider that I don't know a single word of greek, nor even read the alphabet, I can put that text into Google translate, and with a minimum of contextual knowledge of Vassiliki and perhaps Maria, I can get perhaps 80% of the meaning of the paragraph with zero effort. Same deal for the sentence with the teacher; the number of situations where the gender of the teacher is the pivotal point of meaning in the sentence would be very low. That's huge, it's leaps and bounds beyond what I could even begin to achieve without months of training before. I have literally read and made basic sense of signs, posters and menus in greek without even being able to read the alphabet. How is this not substantial progress on "the actual problem of translation"?

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
Let's focus a bit at some of the translationd of sentences in my passage: He had broken his leg and he put blades on him. Basilica, who is a little bit of mascara with him, got something chocolates and flowers. Worst you know who it is? she was Maria, who lost her last year. Destruction! All that's absolute gibberish, obviously. The only reson you are able to make some sense out of it is that you have a human-level understanding of language and that you can place the nonsense strings generated by GT into an appropriate context that can give you some information about their intended meaning. Most however are too garbled to make any sense of them- the second string is the most striking one. This is not "good enough" (as opposed to perfect). That's just terribly bad. If you think it works for you that's only because you're so good at understanding language by dint of your being human (well- I assume). Of course human translators get it badly wrong. I've read human translations that are not much better than that nonsense above, to be honest. But a reasonably competent human translator will never make the kind of elementary mistakes that automatic translation does. And those elementary mistakes will always escalate to the point that the meaning of longer passages will deteriorate to gibberish. As to being able to understand basic signs, posters and menus in Greek- you can do that with a good travel guide also. And the travel guide will not claim to be a breakthrough Artificial Intelligence system, like Google claims for GT.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  To expound a bit on poor human translations- when a human translator can't make sense of a passage in the original language, they'll come up with a meaning that makes sense in the context of the translation so-far. So the final translation will make some sense, even if that sense is not an accurate reproduction of the meaning of the original. When machine translation makes mistakes on the other hand, the translation itself makes no sense. It's not just that its meaning is unconnected to the original; its meaning isn't.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    Yes, human translation is better, that's a trivially simple point, but irrelevant for deciding whether machine translation is very good and amazingly useful in the absence of a human translator.
    - henrikschroder 9y ago
      No, the problem that YeGoblynQueenne points out is that when the current state-of-the-art machine translators get it wrong, they get it hilariously, catastrophically, gibberish-wrong. If a system is 99% right, but the remaining 1% is catastrophically bad, it negates a lot of the part that is actually good. You might end up more confused by the machine translation than you were without it. Machine translations is one of these systems where 99% good simply isn't good enough.
      - the_af 9y ago
        > Machine translations is one of these systems where 99% good simply isn't good enough. I really, really disagree. If 99% lets me understand the gist of an idea, or instructions for something (of course: where there is no risk of harm), I'd take it -- even with the 1% of hilariously catastrophic mistranslations. This means I can go to Japan or Greece and just use Google Translate and be reasonably confident I can manage with a combination of this tool and my human-level understanding of language :) It's definitely good enough for me.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

Let's focus a bit at some of the translationd of sentences in my passage: He had broken his leg and he put blades on him. Basilica, who is a little bit of mascara with him, got something chocolates and flowers. Worst you know who it is? she was Maria, who lost her last year. Destruction! All that's absolute gibberish, obviously. The only reson you are able to make some sense out of it is that you have a human-level understanding of language and that you can place the nonsense strings generated by GT into an appropriate context that can give you some information about their intended meaning. Most however are too garbled to make any sense of them- the second string is the most striking one. This is not "good enough" (as opposed to perfect). That's just terribly bad. If you think it works for you that's only because you're so good at understanding language by dint of your being human (well- I assume). Of course human translators get it badly wrong. I've read human translations that are not much better than that nonsense above, to be honest. But a reasonably competent human translator will never make the kind of elementary mistakes that automatic translation does. And those elementary mistakes will always escalate to the point that the meaning of longer passages will deteriorate to gibberish. As to being able to understand basic signs, posters and menus in Greek- you can do that with a good travel guide also. And the travel guide will not claim to be a breakthrough Artificial Intelligence system, like Google claims for GT.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
To expound a bit on poor human translations- when a human translator can't make sense of a passage in the original language, they'll come up with a meaning that makes sense in the context of the translation so-far. So the final translation will make some sense, even if that sense is not an accurate reproduction of the meaning of the original. When machine translation makes mistakes on the other hand, the translation itself makes no sense. It's not just that its meaning is unconnected to the original; its meaning isn't.
- mseebach 9y ago
  Yes, human translation is better, that's a trivially simple point, but irrelevant for deciding whether machine translation is very good and amazingly useful in the absence of a human translator.
  - henrikschroder 9y ago
    No, the problem that YeGoblynQueenne points out is that when the current state-of-the-art machine translators get it wrong, they get it hilariously, catastrophically, gibberish-wrong. If a system is 99% right, but the remaining 1% is catastrophically bad, it negates a lot of the part that is actually good. You might end up more confused by the machine translation than you were without it. Machine translations is one of these systems where 99% good simply isn't good enough.
    - the_af 9y ago
      > Machine translations is one of these systems where 99% good simply isn't good enough. I really, really disagree. If 99% lets me understand the gist of an idea, or instructions for something (of course: where there is no risk of harm), I'd take it -- even with the 1% of hilariously catastrophic mistranslations. This means I can go to Japan or Greece and just use Google Translate and be reasonably confident I can manage with a combination of this tool and my human-level understanding of language :) It's definitely good enough for me.