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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 an
by 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 agoNative 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 agoTrue. 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.