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Google translate does a just about acceptable job on Indo European languages. Diverge a little further and it often descends into comically poor. One of the mo

Google translate does a just about acceptable job on Indo European languages. Diverge a little further and it often descends into comically poor. One of the most enjoyable things I used to find about travel was experiencing and dipping into other cultures and trying out a little local language picked up from phrase books etc. These days people seem to prefer practising their English on me as I'm a native English speaker. I miss those global differences more and more as everyone adopts English and global brands.

dorchadas 8y ago
> Google translate does a just about acceptable job on Indo European languages. Diverge a little further and it often descends into comically poor. Not even all Indo-European ones. It's absolutely awful at trying to translate to and from Irish, for instance.
- xxpor 8y ago
  Probably because it doesn't have full official status at the EU. Google has a ton of data for EU languages because documents have to be translated between them all.
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    It's an official language, but not a full _working_ language, something which seems to be slated to change within the next few years. In my personal opinion, however, knowing the quality of "Irish" [1] that the translators will have, is that it still won't really help translation all that much if you wish to actually communicate with native speakers. [1] There's a huge rift forming in Irish between the "Gaelscoilis" or "Urban Irish" that is learnt and passed on by non-native speakers and that which is passed on in the traditional areas. Unfortunately, there's also a lack of communication between the two areas, partly because they struggle to understand each other; natives from the traditional area often have to translate the non-traditional speakers' Irish to English in order to understand the meaning, for instance. There's also the fact that the people creating the legal terms for the language often don't really have a firm grasp on the history or nuances of various words or the language, and are often themselves not native speakers. This led to a funny incident where they translated "dental hygienist" as "toothed hygienist" in the official dictionary of new terms. It's also likely to lead to a "Neo-Irish" that is completely divorced from the language as used in the Gaeltachtaí (traditional speaking areas); one linguist has even gone so far as to say it'll be "Irish in English drag", which looks truer and truer when you look at the errors they make and pass on.
eftychis 8y ago
Google translate is really bad. Greek to English is terrible plainly. German to English the same -- was trying to prove a point about the meaning of a phrase and speed typed skipping umlaut. To this day I am not sure what the inference is to result in such a distant translation if you forget a single Umlaut. Every time I have to correct a friend's/family's work that used Google translate I facepalm. I suggest people learn to use dictionaries again (type of dictionary depends on application). I wouldn't trust my life on Google translate, i.e. while traveling.
- yorwba 8y ago
  Native German speakers do not usually forget umlauts (since they are separate keys) and so Google translate won't have the necessary training data to robustly handle German without umlauts. The output appears as gibberish because the language model can't distinguish the input from gibberish. That becomes more obvious if you intentionally input nonsense: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=35120 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=35120
  - eftychis 8y ago
    True. However, I claim Google translate is a lot of times used by non-conversant level German speakers, who don't have the right layout. I would expect Google translate to be trained somewhat adversarially. Example: "Ich werde Bücher lesen" translates just fine. If we skip the Umlaut Google translate "forgets" the meaning of books. If we change the tense to present everything translates just fine.

dorchadas 8y ago

> Google translate does a just about acceptable job on Indo European languages. Diverge a little further and it often descends into comically poor. Not even all Indo-European ones. It's absolutely awful at trying to translate to and from Irish, for instance.

xxpor 8y ago
Probably because it doesn't have full official status at the EU. Google has a ton of data for EU languages because documents have to be translated between them all.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  It's an official language, but not a full _working_ language, something which seems to be slated to change within the next few years. In my personal opinion, however, knowing the quality of "Irish" [1] that the translators will have, is that it still won't really help translation all that much if you wish to actually communicate with native speakers. [1] There's a huge rift forming in Irish between the "Gaelscoilis" or "Urban Irish" that is learnt and passed on by non-native speakers and that which is passed on in the traditional areas. Unfortunately, there's also a lack of communication between the two areas, partly because they struggle to understand each other; natives from the traditional area often have to translate the non-traditional speakers' Irish to English in order to understand the meaning, for instance. There's also the fact that the people creating the legal terms for the language often don't really have a firm grasp on the history or nuances of various words or the language, and are often themselves not native speakers. This led to a funny incident where they translated "dental hygienist" as "toothed hygienist" in the official dictionary of new terms. It's also likely to lead to a "Neo-Irish" that is completely divorced from the language as used in the Gaeltachtaí (traditional speaking areas); one linguist has even gone so far as to say it'll be "Irish in English drag", which looks truer and truer when you look at the errors they make and pass on.

eftychis 8y ago

Google translate is really bad. Greek to English is terrible plainly. German to English the same -- was trying to prove a point about the meaning of a phrase and speed typed skipping umlaut. To this day I am not sure what the inference is to result in such a distant translation if you forget a single Umlaut. Every time I have to correct a friend's/family's work that used Google translate I facepalm. I suggest people learn to use dictionaries again (type of dictionary depends on application). I wouldn't trust my life on Google translate, i.e. while traveling.

yorwba 8y ago
Native German speakers do not usually forget umlauts (since they are separate keys) and so Google translate won't have the necessary training data to robustly handle German without umlauts. The output appears as gibberish because the language model can't distinguish the input from gibberish. That becomes more obvious if you intentionally input nonsense: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=35120 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=35120
- eftychis 8y ago
  True. However, I claim Google translate is a lot of times used by non-conversant level German speakers, who don't have the right layout. I would expect Google translate to be trained somewhat adversarially. Example: "Ich werde Bücher lesen" translates just fine. If we skip the Umlaut Google translate "forgets" the meaning of books. If we change the tense to present everything translates just fine.