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This is absurd. You keep insisting on perfection or nothing at all. There is such a thing as incremental progress. Google Translate is supremely useful in the

This is absurd. You keep insisting on perfection or nothing at all. There is such a thing as incremental progress. Google Translate is supremely useful in the absence of a better alternative. Nobody is contesting that human translation is better than Google Translate, but a human translator isn't always available. Google Translate is better than nothing at all. A child's first many, many attempts at language are absolute gibberish, then slowly individual words, then combinations of words, then gradually more complex sentences etc -- gradually over several years. When you child first says "mama", the common response is excitement, not berating the child and anyone excited that "mama" isn't Wordsworth, and asking if just saying "mama" is acceptable, why aren't we all just communicating using single words all the time? A child being able to express itself at all using language is better than it not being able to, and cause for celebration, and so too it is with Google Translate.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> You keep insisting on perfection or nothing at all. There is such a thing as incremental progress. I think we're talking at cross-purposes here a bit. I don't really care whether GT is useful as a tool. I care about whether the translations it offers are good translations or not. I think you're basically saying that, if it's good enough for you, then it's a good translation. However, this is not a good measure of the quality of a translation! To begin with, what's good for you is a sujective measure. Further, we wouldn't accept "it's good enough for me" for any other translation than a machine translation- and it's accepted for GT only because we understand the limitations of machine translation systems. So basically my pointing out the limitations of machine translation systems has nothing to do with whether it's useful to you. It's an attempt to explain why the results of machine translation are objectively bad. I'll agree if you want that it's very difficult to get to such an objective measure of goodness or badness. But that's actually a reason why it's so hard to do machine translation properly: because it's next to impossible to evaluate machine translation objectively, which in turn makes for a very poorly defined task. So you can feel justified to say that GT is OK for you, because you can understand it. Others can say that it sucks because they can't. And Google can say it's a breakthrough in AI because it scores high on their formal tests, evaluating using BLEU score (or something equally arbitrary). But none of those tells us how good or bad GT translation really is. So we're left with what Hofstadter does (and what I did here): eyballing it. And, eyballing it, you can see that it's making elementary, egregious mistakes that are not justified by the hype surrounding GT as a product. Btw, we can expect a child to get better at using language because most children do. So far, no machine translation system has got a lot better than GT- and I don't even agree that GT has gotten any better over the years, or that it's even any better than earlier systems. It just happens to be Google's system and they advertise it as the best ever- but they can't actually, you know, prove this.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> You keep insisting on perfection or nothing at all. There is such a thing as incremental progress. I think we're talking at cross-purposes here a bit. I don't really care whether GT is useful as a tool. I care about whether the translations it offers are good translations or not. I think you're basically saying that, if it's good enough for you, then it's a good translation. However, this is not a good measure of the quality of a translation! To begin with, what's good for you is a sujective measure. Further, we wouldn't accept "it's good enough for me" for any other translation than a machine translation- and it's accepted for GT only because we understand the limitations of machine translation systems. So basically my pointing out the limitations of machine translation systems has nothing to do with whether it's useful to you. It's an attempt to explain why the results of machine translation are objectively bad. I'll agree if you want that it's very difficult to get to such an objective measure of goodness or badness. But that's actually a reason why it's so hard to do machine translation properly: because it's next to impossible to evaluate machine translation objectively, which in turn makes for a very poorly defined task. So you can feel justified to say that GT is OK for you, because you can understand it. Others can say that it sucks because they can't. And Google can say it's a breakthrough in AI because it scores high on their formal tests, evaluating using BLEU score (or something equally arbitrary). But none of those tells us how good or bad GT translation really is. So we're left with what Hofstadter does (and what I did here): eyballing it. And, eyballing it, you can see that it's making elementary, egregious mistakes that are not justified by the hype surrounding GT as a product. Btw, we can expect a child to get better at using language because most children do. So far, no machine translation system has got a lot better than GT- and I don't even agree that GT has gotten any better over the years, or that it's even any better than earlier systems. It just happens to be Google's system and they advertise it as the best ever- but they can't actually, you know, prove this.