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Its proves that _really_ simple concepts aren't being conveyed despite the claims that it is more than simple word substitution. The linked article talks about

Its proves that _really_ simple concepts aren't being conveyed despite the claims that it is more than simple word substitution. The linked article talks about translation of things which require some cultural knowledge. The idea that an overweight house cat is sitting on a protective piece of material is simply lost, and replaced with "big cat" which could just as well be a lion or a bed is misleading at best and just plain wrong at worse. I might understand if the target languages didn't have a concept because its cultural. That sentence failing to be translated implies that the target language doesn't have the concept of people/animals being overweight, or what a mat is. I might be more accepting if it came back with "throw rug" or something instead of mat, but it never does that, its like it has a list of rough synonyms and it picks one at random. Hence the "Fat cat" bit becoming what likely was "oily cat". The more subtle things (cat in this case being a house cat/pet) might be the bit of cultural information that lends understanding to the whole sentence, but it most cases that isn't really what the translation is getting wrong.. Claiming any of this is even near human translation levels is misleading at best, considering it falls down worse than most poorly translated computer manuals I've read. Despite all the claims of the wonders of DNN's the translations look little more advanced than direct word translations (fat=oil or mat=something you sleep on) with a bit of fuzz that fails in strange ways.

jeffdavis 9y ago
Rather than translating the description into an abstract idea, and then translating that idea into a different language; it seems like it's trying to go straight from English to Chinese.
- Balgair 9y ago
  To be fair, translating to 'idea-space' is really hard. The medium is the message. We have ideas in English that other languages do not have, and vice versa. Chinese is famous for not having a past tense. Spanish has a subjunctive tense that is difficult for fluent speakers to translate into English. Some languages have cardinal direction based gender tenses. The word 'che' in Italian is a head-tweaker for English speakers. The problem expands as a binomial (handshaking problem). Google translate has 104 languages, which means 5356 cases to deal with (n(n-1)/2) for each 'idea' present. As such, the 'idea' could be translated, but it would result in a mess of a response that no native speaker would translate the 'idea' into. You'd have to teach the basics of the language to the person before real translation could occur. Languages are meant to communicate between two people (writing is subtly, but importantly, different) and context, body language, and recent history play large roles into that communication.
Balgair 9y ago
> Claiming any of this is even near human translation levels is misleading at best Oh, got it. The issue is that Google is misrepresenting it's translate service as an 'end-all-be-all'. Yes, I would agree with that. But as Hackers, we should know better than to think that it could ever be such, given that it is just a text-entry box. NLP needs a lot of context that a text box can never have.

jeffdavis 9y ago

Rather than translating the description into an abstract idea, and then translating that idea into a different language; it seems like it's trying to go straight from English to Chinese.

Balgair 9y ago
To be fair, translating to 'idea-space' is really hard. The medium is the message. We have ideas in English that other languages do not have, and vice versa. Chinese is famous for not having a past tense. Spanish has a subjunctive tense that is difficult for fluent speakers to translate into English. Some languages have cardinal direction based gender tenses. The word 'che' in Italian is a head-tweaker for English speakers. The problem expands as a binomial (handshaking problem). Google translate has 104 languages, which means 5356 cases to deal with (n(n-1)/2) for each 'idea' present. As such, the 'idea' could be translated, but it would result in a mess of a response that no native speaker would translate the 'idea' into. You'd have to teach the basics of the language to the person before real translation could occur. Languages are meant to communicate between two people (writing is subtly, but importantly, different) and context, body language, and recent history play large roles into that communication.

Balgair 9y ago

> Claiming any of this is even near human translation levels is misleading at best Oh, got it. The issue is that Google is misrepresenting it's translate service as an 'end-all-be-all'. Yes, I would agree with that. But as Hackers, we should know better than to think that it could ever be such, given that it is just a text-entry box. NLP needs a lot of context that a text box can never have.