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A bit more info, including a test where Google doesn't lose gender information when the English word happens to have it (actor/actress): https://www.quora.com/

A bit more info, including a test where Google doesn't lose gender information when the English word happens to have it (actor/actress): https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-Translate-use-English-as-an-intermediary-step-language-Spanish-English-Italian https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-Translate-use-English-as-a... It appears that they have been trying to construct (with ML, not by hand) a universal intermediary language since at least 2016 to avoid this sort of thing, but that it still isn't as good as just using English as the intermediary. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translate-ai-invents-its-own-language-to-translate-with/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translat...

username223 9y ago
> It appears that they have been trying to construct (with ML, not by hand) a universal intermediary language... Oops. Google has enough money to hire some linguists, so they hopefully have heard of the debates over Chomsky's Universal Grammar. "Universal human language" is highly unlikely to work; it doesn't even work well for color names.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
My understanding is that English is the intermediary language, but not on purpose- they tried to create an "interlingua" but they trained with too many English-to-X and X-to-English data and ended up with a model of English as their intermediary language model. And it's hard even for them to know because their models are opaque and hardly amenable to principled examination. (I mean, you can't prove anything about them, so you can't really know what they're doing in there).