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Blog author here. Surprised to see one of my old posts on the front page while browsing Hacker News. It's interesting to reflect on what has improved since I w

Blog author here. Surprised to see one of my old posts on the front page while browsing Hacker News. It's interesting to reflect on what has improved since I wrote it, and what has not. Both Android and iOS, for instance, provide mechanisms to get this right, if you know to use them and expose them for those locales (and only those locales). For example, both have a Contact object that contain corresponding phonetic-reading fields for first and last names. iOS Contact - see phoneticGivenName, phoneticFamilyName https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contacts/cncontact https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contacts/cncontact Android contact - see PHONETIC_GIVEN_NAME, PHONETIC_FAMILY_NAME https://developer.android.com/reference/android/provider/ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.StructuredName https://developer.android.com/reference/android/provider/Con... For fun I tried using Google Translate to translate the kanji name in the post 淳子 in various contexts to see what Google thinks it is: - 淳子 translated to "Dumpling" - 淳子さん translated to "Atsuko" - 淳子様 translated to "Sadako" - 淳子さま translated to "Mrs. Lion" - 淳子殿 translated to "Mr. Reiko" - 私の名前は淳子です translated to "My name is Miko" - 私の名前は淳子です。 translated to "My name is Reiko." - 私の名前は淳子です！ translated to "My name is gyoza!" I expected them all to translate to Junko or Atsuko. The variation and unexpected results for what should be exactly the same thing is very interesting.

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lifthrasiir 8y ago
Many statistical machine translators like Google Translate are very sensitive to the availability of bilingual corpus. In this case GT seems to have learned that -子 means either a dumpling (餃子) or a female name ending with -ko, but haven't seen enough corpus to determine that the preceding 淳 is pronounced either Atsu- or Jun- in given context so it is guessing. Combined with the user-contributed corpus this can be rather disastrous: several machine translators had translated Japanese "初音ミク" [1] to Korean "이명박" [2] ;-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Myung-bak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Myung-bak
fenomas 8y ago
Cool work! But my experience with Google Translate is that nowadays it seems to be wholly focused on machine-learning translations of full sentences, so for single words the results can be almost entirely random. E.g. you type in the characters for the Japanese word for "raisin", and depending on which parts you change to kanji the results can be starfish, dried fish, dried persimmons, etc. On the topic of sorting, I've always found it interesting that Japanese input forms with a pulldown menu for prefecture almost always list them in north to south order, rather than AIUEO or charcode or anything else. I think I read somewhere that this stems from some kind of official government encoding that was baked into Shift-JIS, or something along those lines.
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expat2003 8y ago
People doesn't seem to understand that they cannot have word-to-word translation when it comes to Japanese vs Latin root languages. Also there are grammatical and syntactical rules that you cannot get right by an educated guess - "educated guesses" such Google translate... See, Google translate doesn't care if a person doesn't know that when it comes to Proper names such as the name of a person the Kanji reads in a completely different way than the regular dictionary words. There is no translation for these class of words just as there is none for words like Jason, Tom, Samantha, etc. In such cases one needs to memorize the reading of the character, which reads that way only when it is used for Proper names. If the Kanji of a person have multiple reading such as 淳子, Atsuko, Kyoko and Junko, that person would use what is called Furigana, the Kana only reading showing the sound of that particular Kanji. This happens when you are filling a form, in a contract, in IDs etc. In other words feeding people names to Google only shows only one thing. That person doesn't know what is doing. Sadako is Proper name of a popular iconic character in Japanese culture that embodies a little girl killer ghost and it is based on a real Japanese person that was said to be a psychic and lived in the 1900s. They made at least one horror Japanese movie out of that story and even Hollywood had a go at it! Now, how many girls you think they have been named Sadako in Japan by their parents? Once more Google translate doesn't give a damn if the person using it doesn't know what is doing. In regular writing to mark Proper names a number of suffix are employed さま, どの, さん, くん, ちゃん and more. Every suffix has a different and unequivocal use case. It can be written in Hiragana, like I just did or by using Kanji. If the Kanji is adopted looks like 様 reads さま, 殿 reads どの etc. Also for such words there isn't a clear-cut translation, because they are employed as a result of the implications they come with. For instance 様 or さま is used when referring to customers or clients, but in a business letter you would use 殿 or どの with similar significance. Most amusing is "淳子殿 translated to "Mr. Reiko". On Google Translate left windows in the left-bottom corner there is one of the possible correct reading of 淳子殿, namely Junko-dono. But on the right it's messing it right up. That's the demonstration that Google Translate has no brain. By the way Reiko is written 麗子 as a Proper name... and so is Rika, Akirako, Yoshiko, Urarako . Get the point? You need Furigana. About gyoza, that's the name of a very popular kind of Chinese dumpling made in Japan, and there is no Kanji for it its written in Katakana only as チャオズ. But since it's a Chinese word you can used the two sounds ぎょう and ざ in Hiragana to write the two corresponding Kanji 餃子. To understand why, you need to read my post down the page. It seems Google translate cannot read the first Kanji right. If you feel so inclined, mopreme, read my post down below which covers your original blog post extensively and throughout.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lifthrasiir 8y ago

Many statistical machine translators like Google Translate are very sensitive to the availability of bilingual corpus. In this case GT seems to have learned that -子 means either a dumpling (餃子) or a female name ending with -ko, but haven't seen enough corpus to determine that the preceding 淳 is pronounced either Atsu- or Jun- in given context so it is guessing. Combined with the user-contributed corpus this can be rather disastrous: several machine translators had translated Japanese "初音ミク" [1] to Korean "이명박" [2] ;-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Myung-bak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Myung-bak

fenomas 8y ago

Cool work! But my experience with Google Translate is that nowadays it seems to be wholly focused on machine-learning translations of full sentences, so for single words the results can be almost entirely random. E.g. you type in the characters for the Japanese word for "raisin", and depending on which parts you change to kanji the results can be starfish, dried fish, dried persimmons, etc. On the topic of sorting, I've always found it interesting that Japanese input forms with a pulldown menu for prefecture almost always list them in north to south order, rather than AIUEO or charcode or anything else. I think I read somewhere that this stems from some kind of official government encoding that was baked into Shift-JIS, or something along those lines.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

expat2003 8y ago

People doesn't seem to understand that they cannot have word-to-word translation when it comes to Japanese vs Latin root languages. Also there are grammatical and syntactical rules that you cannot get right by an educated guess - "educated guesses" such Google translate... See, Google translate doesn't care if a person doesn't know that when it comes to Proper names such as the name of a person the Kanji reads in a completely different way than the regular dictionary words. There is no translation for these class of words just as there is none for words like Jason, Tom, Samantha, etc. In such cases one needs to memorize the reading of the character, which reads that way only when it is used for Proper names. If the Kanji of a person have multiple reading such as 淳子, Atsuko, Kyoko and Junko, that person would use what is called Furigana, the Kana only reading showing the sound of that particular Kanji. This happens when you are filling a form, in a contract, in IDs etc. In other words feeding people names to Google only shows only one thing. That person doesn't know what is doing. Sadako is Proper name of a popular iconic character in Japanese culture that embodies a little girl killer ghost and it is based on a real Japanese person that was said to be a psychic and lived in the 1900s. They made at least one horror Japanese movie out of that story and even Hollywood had a go at it! Now, how many girls you think they have been named Sadako in Japan by their parents? Once more Google translate doesn't give a damn if the person using it doesn't know what is doing. In regular writing to mark Proper names a number of suffix are employed さま, どの, さん, くん, ちゃん and more. Every suffix has a different and unequivocal use case. It can be written in Hiragana, like I just did or by using Kanji. If the Kanji is adopted looks like 様 reads さま, 殿 reads どの etc. Also for such words there isn't a clear-cut translation, because they are employed as a result of the implications they come with. For instance 様 or さま is used when referring to customers or clients, but in a business letter you would use 殿 or どの with similar significance. Most amusing is "淳子殿 translated to "Mr. Reiko". On Google Translate left windows in the left-bottom corner there is one of the possible correct reading of 淳子殿, namely Junko-dono. But on the right it's messing it right up. That's the demonstration that Google Translate has no brain. By the way Reiko is written 麗子 as a Proper name... and so is Rika, Akirako, Yoshiko, Urarako . Get the point? You need Furigana. About gyoza, that's the name of a very popular kind of Chinese dumpling made in Japan, and there is no Kanji for it its written in Katakana only as チャオズ. But since it's a Chinese word you can used the two sounds ぎょう and ざ in Hiragana to write the two corresponding Kanji 餃子. To understand why, you need to read my post down the page. It seems Google translate cannot read the first Kanji right. If you feel so inclined, mopreme, read my post down below which covers your original blog post extensively and throughout.