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Since we're complaining about Google Translate, I'd like to mention how ridiculous their "verified translation" system is. It works by throwing automatic transl

Since we're complaining about Google Translate, I'd like to mention how ridiculous their "verified translation" system is. It works by throwing automatic translations at people who, in their majority, have never studied English, and expecting them to tell whether it's right or wrong, but what happens is that most just confirm whatever they get as being correct. As a result, at least for Portuguese, many of them, if not most, are just plain wrong. Considering Translate is such an important product, I can't fathom why they just don't hire a single linguist (or just anyone who isn't completely clueless, really) per language to register decent translations, or at least import them from a real dictionary...

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
Well, the more general problem about asking people visiting Google Translate to verify if a translation from A->B is correct is that generally people visiting Google Translate didn't know how to translate A->B or weren't very sure. How many people on Google Translate actually are able to reasonably verify translations? Relatively few - and those qualified few who might poke at Translate out of curiosity are just as likely not to feel inclined to offer free labour to Google. > Considering Translate is such an important product, I can't fathom why they just don't hire a single linguist (or just anyone who isn't completely clueless, really) per language to register decent translations, or at least import them from a real dictionary... Perhaps professional translators rather than linguists. I imagine they have some linguists on the project, but they're likely to be more NLP-type linguists. The difficulty is that they're interested not just in word-level meaning/translation-accuracy, but also phrase- and clause-level accuracy, and those are really large (i.e. theoretically infinite) spaces. I've heard that the Spanish<->English translations aren't too bad.

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago

Well, the more general problem about asking people visiting Google Translate to verify if a translation from A->B is correct is that generally people visiting Google Translate didn't know how to translate A->B or weren't very sure. How many people on Google Translate actually are able to reasonably verify translations? Relatively few - and those qualified few who might poke at Translate out of curiosity are just as likely not to feel inclined to offer free labour to Google. > Considering Translate is such an important product, I can't fathom why they just don't hire a single linguist (or just anyone who isn't completely clueless, really) per language to register decent translations, or at least import them from a real dictionary... Perhaps professional translators rather than linguists. I imagine they have some linguists on the project, but they're likely to be more NLP-type linguists. The difficulty is that they're interested not just in word-level meaning/translation-accuracy, but also phrase- and clause-level accuracy, and those are really large (i.e. theoretically infinite) spaces. I've heard that the Spanish<->English translations aren't too bad.