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Douglas Hofstadter: The Shallowness of Google Translate (2018)

95 points by andrepd 7y ago

JasonFruit 7y ago
Douglas Hofstadter is a pompous buffoon. His style is infuriating, pushing his undoubtedly fine intellect in the reader's face. He writes for people who want to believe themselves smarter than most, and the only cost of admission is that they validate Hofstadter's high self-opinion. We all know by the end of the article that Hofstadter is a better translator than Google Translate, but nobody believes that Google Translate is going to match the work of someone who understands the text they are translating. Hofstadter claims he's not cherry-picking difficult examples, but he has chosen two passages where gender is critical, and moved them between languages where gender is expressed in very different ways. It's a tricky part of translation, as Hofstadter knows, and nobody expects a computer to speculate on the intentions of the author of a passage, as you must to successfully translate his examples. Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language --- and that's a great advance. Hofstadter expresses an expectation that no-one holds for an automatic translation tool, shows that Google Translate does not live up to it, and then is satisfied with himself, as usual.
- austincheney 7y ago
  I got something different out of the article other than offense at education envy.
- sorokod 7y ago
  Instead of an ad hominem, would you care to address the specific examples sighted in the article?
  - JasonFruit 7y ago
    I did a bit, but honestly, my main point is that I can't stand Hofstadter's style, either of writing or thinking. It's not an ad hominem attack to prove some other point; it's intended as a criticism of the man himself.
  - watt 7y ago
    I skimmed the article, but it seems the purpose of it would be better served as series of issue reports in the Google Translate bug tracking system than a full article. I think it's not really that interesting to diss the state of the machine translation art in 2019, instead of looking where it could be in 2020, 2025, 2030.
    - andrepd 7y ago
      >issue reports You miss the point. The point is that the "deep" learning approach is fundamentally flawed and will not lead to proper translation no matter how many racks of GPUs you throw at it, since it lacks the "understanding of ideas" required to do it.
- arketyp 7y ago
  It comes off as quite arrogant of Hofstadter to imply that people believe translation has now been solved by deep learning. You don't even have to be bilingual and know the other language to detect the subtleties lost by machine translation. It would have been interesting to hear the reflections of the Danish speaking friend. I can imagine Frank finds Google Translate practical for simple words that actually are more or less 1-to-1, things you would otherwise look up in a dictionary. And probably his Danish friend can pick up any idioms and such that Google Translate distorts anyway.
  - interfixus 7y ago
    I utterly fail to see the point. In all likelihood I would take offense and cut short any further communication, should someone attempt to talk to me through Google [or whatever] Translate (but then, I can barely stand plain Gmail). For what it's worth, Danish actually is my native language.
    - xbmcuser 7y ago
      When I visited Thailand last year most of the apps like Uber and Grab were using Google auto translate in the chats. Made communicating with the car drivers painless. Many people knock these auto translations but after knowing people that can't read English the major language of the internet. I can't look at the translations with the kind of disdain many here seem to feel. As these auto translations open the world to lot more people that were sidelined previously.
- ozim 7y ago
  The practical utility of Google Translate and similar technologies is undeniable, and probably it’s a good thing overall, but there is still something deeply lacking in the approach, which is conveyed by a single word: understanding. It all boils down to this paragraph, and no one can say it is not true.
  - gwern 7y ago
    You certainly can, and that is the biggest problem with this article: a completely lack of interest in understanding what deep learning understands (ironically). Hofstadter, having completely missed the boat on connectionism, committed himself to a failed paradigm, and been wrong about AI time after time (remember when Hofstadter claimed beating humans at chess would require computers to have emotions and be able to write poems?), totally fails to grapple with what NNs do do. For starters, Google Translate is a free service and not necessarily SOTA, even when he wrote this. For example, if you were going to ask 'what do multi-lingual translation seq2seq RNNs (or Transformers) understand?', the immediate obvious thing to discuss would be questions about the 'interlingua' which their embedding yields, things that word embeddings learn (including surprising things like relative locations of cities or sizes of objects), or about transfer learning to tasks that require grammar or reasoning or common-sense like Winograd schemas like in GLUE or SuperGLUE, and how they improve massively over earlier approaches and how they are scaling (one of the most important trends in AI). There is a great deal which could be said here, demonstrating why it works so well and why it doesn't work sometimes, and an AI researcher is just the sort of person to ask. And unfortunately, Hofstadter does none of this and instead bangs on about some errors he found, like it's a total blackbox and understanding is a binary where you either like the same poetry Hofstadter does or you are a cretin, and takes the attitude that any error shows that the approach has failed, is failing, and always will fail because it is 'deeply lacking' (what, exactly? And to think, he complains about 'deep' being abused for rhetorical purposes before and then goes and produces a shallow exercise like this). I thought this was a lousy neo-luddite essay in 2018, and it's only gotten worse since then. In another 10 years, it'll look like Cliff Stoll.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- tjpnz 7y ago
  >Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language --- and that's a great advance. For some languages it will, they targeted the official working languages of the UN at the time. I hear for them it's pretty good. Personally, I live in Japan and rely on Google Translate every day and my experience has been generally crap. I've seen it get some simpler phrases in Japanese dead wrong and have been noticing it more often the more I learn the language. The part that infuriates me the most is how translations for simple phrases seem to change on an almost daily basis. Not long ago it had a pretty good translation for the formal (keigo) greeting used in business correspondence but as of a few months ago it utterly mangles it. Yes language changes but not this quickly, a lot of these phrases would've been used by the great grandparents of my colleagues.
- andrepd 7y ago
  >Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language Which is precisely what he says. > Hofstadter expresses an expectation that no-one holds for an automatic translation tool, As demonstrated by the quote at the start, about Russian being just English coded in strange symbols, and also by the unreal hype around "neural networks", plenty of people do on fact hold unrealistic expectations of automatic translation. How many times have you heard someone say translator jobs are going to be automated away in 5 or 10 years? I've heard and read it plenty of times.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  > but he has chosen two passages where gender is critical, and moved them between languages where gender is expressed in very different ways. So what, if the program can't handle these simple sentences, it can't claim to be a translation program. The machine 'translation' throws away the entire point of the sentence. Why don't we just evolve towards the machines and start speaking to each other in JSON (We should come up with a more efficient way to pronounce '}' as soon as possible!) Most of the AI revolution is just parlour tricks and marketing puffery. Fourth grade children could translate the French sentence better.
- vixen99 7y ago
  Make a point but better keep the name calling and gross generalizations regarding those who read Hofstadter's output for readers that enjoy that kind of pointless abuse. There are plenty of other outlets for it.
- Uhuhreally 7y ago
  would you prefer that he hid his light under a bushel ?
crgwbr 7y ago
From my own experience, I’ve found that Google can be a useful tool. But you have to understand the difficult bits of each language you’re translating between and specifically write around them, making the translations tool job a lot easier. E.g. specifically avoid idioms, words with double meanings, etc.
pen2l 7y ago
The trick is not to rely on Google translate for a finished translation, but to use it just as a tool toward reaching that goal. As someone who is learning French these days, it is an absolute boon. One of my favorite things is letting Google auto finish a sentence.... because those auto finished sentences usually tend to be phrases or constructs French speakers use a lot. The other neat thing is that Google shows a check mark near a translation which it feels with high confidence is good — in my experiences those translations really are good and without fault.
- asaph 7y ago
  > The trick is not to rely on Google translate for a finished translation, but to use it just as a tool toward reaching that goal. This assumes the use case is a translator fluent in the source and target languages translating a passage. The far more common use cases for Google translate are people with near-zero knowledge of either the source or target language and little chance of completing the task successfully.
- andrepd 7y ago
  He addresses that: >Let me return to that sad image of human translators, soon outdone and outmoded, gradually turning into nothing but quality controllers and text tweakers. That’s a recipe for mediocrity at best. A serious artist doesn’t start with a kitschy piece of error-ridden bilgewater and then patch it up here and there to produce a work of high art. For somebody learning a language, they would be even more easily mislead.
  - Mathnerd314 7y ago
    It's faster than using a dictionary to look up words one-by-one, and Google's actually integrated a dictionary into the interface. And beginner sentences are well-represented in the corpus so they're relatively unlikely to mislead. Using Google Translate for learning a language could be likened to using training wheels on a bike.
    - Jamwinner 7y ago
oefrha 7y ago
Shallowness is one obvious problem (obvious to any bilingual person). The more troubling problem I’ve noticed is that occasionally it’s inexplicably outright wrong about basic things. Anecdote time. One day in late 2017 (I remember that because of an event), a friend of mine read a Google-translated page in Chinese, and sent it to me (fluent in Chinese) because a statistics was “amazing”. I looked at it, turned out Google translated 万, meaning “ten thousand”, to “million”. Of course the number was unbelievably good. I honestly couldn’t think of how that happened.
- danaris 7y ago
  I don't know about Chinese, but in Japanese, 万 is frequently used idiomatically in the same way we might in English use "a million"—just to mean "a whole hell of a lot."
  - oefrha 7y ago
    You’re right, except it was a statistic like 2.8万, translated to 2.8 million. Your take could point to a possible cause, though, maybe also putting it under the “shallow” category. (Additionally, when 万 is used in Chinese to mean a whole lot, I would translate it to “thousands of” or “tens of thousands of”.)
    - carlmr 7y ago
      Myriad might be the perfect translation then. It comes from Greek for 10,000 and is now routinely used for "a lot" in English.
- fsh 7y ago
  I once google-translated a russian technical document and it replaced all occurances of "мкВт" (microwatt) with "mW" (milliwatt). Took me a while to figure out why all stated powers were way off.
- fenomas 7y ago
  I get errors like this from Google Translate all the time. I assume it's because the engine is fully ML (which seems to be good at getting larger grammatical structures but sometimes mistakes individual words), as opposed to some kind of expert system approach (which can easily look up individual words but tends to make soup out of them). As for the error you saw, here's a guess: a million yen is ten thousand dollars, so an ML agent trained on JP/EN text that discusses money might see those numbers crop up a lot in close proximity.
timonoko 7y ago
Did somebody say "shallow"?: https://photos.app.goo.gl/wDy8TQR69iwuGUZb6 https://photos.app.goo.gl/wDy8TQR69iwuGUZb6
- clarry 7y ago
  The intersection of a donkey and a horse is called a mule or a mule . The mule father is a donkey and the mother is a horse cat, while the mule father is a horse and the mother is a donkey cat. Both junctions are almost always sterile. At the age of two, stallions are driven away from the herd and form their own herds by collecting oaks. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAasi https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... There are four species of wild deer in the wild: deer , wild deer , deer and white-tailed deer . Elk are by far the largest of these species. All species of Finnish deer are game animals . Despite its name, spruce deer do not belong to deer but to deer [2] [5] . It has also been referred to as the deer [4] [5], to distinguish it from the deer ( Cervinae ). The Mammalian Nomenclature Committee has proposed that the sub-tribe be renamed in Finnish to the goats . https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FPeurat https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=htt... The subspecies of Canis aureus lupaster, previously defined as a subspecies of live cabbage in North Africa, originates from South Asian gray matter based on DNA analyzes published in 2011. [18] [19] The North American red wolf ( Rufus ) has also been the subject of scientific debate, for example as a cross between coyote and gray matter. The same genus of wolves as the wolf canis is the goldfish, the warbler , the warbler , the Ethiopian wolf and the coyote , and the dingo , which is nowadays generally classified as a wolf subspecies. The survival of young kittens depends a lot on how many adult wolves and babysitters remain in the herd. Less than half of the wolf catching attempts are successful. A deer or a creepy male stuck in a threatening position is likely to survive, but the fugitive gets the wolves to his feet. The wolf can carry loose pieces of pregnant mother and puppies in the nest or vomit the contents of their stomachs into the puppies. In Central Finland, for example, the formation of new worms has been observed to have led to a reduction in foxes and raccoon dogs and, as a result, to an increase in woodland chicks. [40] This behavior, on the other hand, exposes wolves to infectious diseases in small beasts , especially the wardrobe . https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSusi https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=htt... Whales are also reared as fur animals, known as the blue fox. The bean is most active in the twilight, when it comes up in search of food. Its main food is the fells and, to some extent, the moles . In years when small rodents are scarce, the bean has to deal with birds, their eggs and chicks, and berries and carrion, for example. The situation of the species is particularly poor in Scandinavia and Finland. However, globally, the whale is not endangered. According to a report published in 2008, the stock of nuts is gradually gaining ground in the Nordic countries . In Finland, the whale is classified as extremely endangered . [5] As a popular fur animal , in the twentieth century, wild white fox was hunted almost extinct in Finland. Even in the early 20th century, the species was abundant in Lapland, and during the winter of 1908-1909, whales migrated all the way to the southern coast of the country. Attempts have been made to improve the livelihood of Naal by hunting foxes and providing the nipples with nourishment and other food. [12] [13] In Norway and Sweden, dogfish are fed on dogfish, which has contributed to the growth of the stock. [7] The survival of nails is also hampered by the fact that they are no longer provided with enough reindeer kills for wolves and wolves. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FNaali https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=htt... fi->en translations are so funny that I read them when I'm feeling down. Few other things make me laugh out loud so much. Part of me hopes they never invent a better way to translate.
robomartin 7y ago
I’ll equate this to being critical of any early technology as if no further development will happen. Translation, good translation, is not easy. If it were, it would have been a solved problem years ago. And, yes, some languages pose more challenges than others. I often have to write the same text in multiple languages. I usually write in English and use Google Translate to quickly generate a rough draft translation in other languages, say, Spanish. I then copy-paste the translation, proofread and edit. It is a huge time saver. Aside from not having to re-write the material, the cognitive load of the proofreading and editing process is significantly lower.
- glenstein 7y ago
  I guess the right things to take from the article are (1) the validity of the criticism, as a legitimate face value observation, but also as a way of sketching the kinds of problems and areas where we hope for progress and (2) the fact that Google Translate is nevertheless useful in its current form. I think his overall thesis isn't a declaration that no further progress will be possible, but that it may have to draw from resources that are more than just statistical associations of words - things like interior human experiences. So it would not just measure words against surrounding passages, but against some understanding of concept generation that emerges from human subjectivity. And, this is where I think a fuse blows for many people, things get complicated, circuits fry, and people find themselves filled with an urge to declare"well, computers just CAN'T do X." But I think what Hofstadter is saying is that it is a hard problem but also the kind of thing that in principle could be done to make progress on translation.
  - robomartin 7y ago
    Achieving human-level understanding is the canonical problem in AI. I think I can say we don’t yet know how to encode and represent this thing called understanding. We are excellent at classification and sub-par at understanding, with translation being just one of the many application domains that will benefit when we go through the understanding inflection point.
- uryga 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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laichzeit0 7y ago
I really hate pieces like this. Hofstadter should know better than anyone how state-of-the-art machine translation works. Only absolute laymen would use words like “understanding” to describe what’s going on. It’s really good, and we’re a lot further than we were 10 years ago but honest to god people should just drop using anthropomorphic laden terms like “understanding” and “intelligence” into these discussions. The I in AI is unfortunately taken too literally. Maybe just do yourself a favor and watch the videos to CS224 [1] and then you’d be less surprised that these systems do not “understand” (whatever the hell that even means, unless rigorously defined). [1] http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224n/ http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224n/
glenstein 7y ago
Hofstadter is trying to draw a conceptual distinction between "understanding" (generating language by drawing from a full interiority of human subjective experience), and mere "translation" (based on looking at words). But analyzing how words are used is a great way of working backward into something that gets closer and closer to human subjectivity. Some neural net trained on how words are used would start to model concepts that reflect "under the hood" human experiences that generate language. Maybe it's not 'enough', and a robust translation engine would have a sense of irony, jealousy, favorite foods, etc that it would need to rely on to translate things, and maybe that set of concepts to be obtained via something other than training on words. But I don't think there's a clear conceptual line to be drawn. Studying the way we use words can get us a loose approximation, maybe even a good one.
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  The Chinese example at the end where he had to look up the phrase himself (on Google) is particularly revealing. Humans don't have any more insight into words than the machine. They're just better at interpreting explanations written by humans and intended for humans.
coldtea 7y ago
>In this scenario, human translators would become, within a few years, mere quality controllers and glitch fixers, rather than producers of fresh new text. Such a development would cause a soul-shattering upheaval in my mental life. Although I fully understand the fascination of trying to get machines to translate well, I am not in the least eager to see human translators replaced by inanimate machines. Indeed, the idea frightens and revolts me. To my mind, translation is an incredibly subtle art that draws constantly on one’s many years of experience in life, and on one’s creative imagination. Well, there's another way to achieve the same effect, by turning anything written or spoken into such trivial BS, that any old translation will do. When nuance is not appreciated or delivered, then you don't need to translate nuance. When literature is replaced by skimming online articles, there's no much nuance to begin with.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  I don't think you're wrong and there is still many valid use cases for machine translation. There are many situations where text should not be nuanced or contain subtlety, like business signage or instructions. It should be clear and direct, however people often want to convey frustration either actively or passively. Often people want to be playful around awkward or uncomfortable messaging. And there are times when they want to appear humble.
lowdose 7y ago
I lately think the auto translation on youtube is better than on google.
fizixer 7y ago
If I'm not wrong, this is a continuation of Hofstadter's critique of the "new AI" (i.e., AI boom since 2006 based on machine learning) and how it is at odds with his conception of what needs to be done in order to move towards AGI based on ideas surrounding his book Godel, Escher, Bach [1]. For context, please read this in light of the 2013 piece in The Atlantic [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man...
crazygringo 7y ago
> that human translators may be an endangered species. In this scenario, human translators would become, within a few years, mere quality controllers and glitch fixers, rather than producers of fresh new text. Huh? As someone who's worked in translation briefly before, that's already the case and has been for at least a decade -- at least for written material that's not "art" (literature, poetry). It's far faster for professional translators to run something through Google Translate or similar and then clean it up, than type it out from scratch. And identical quality in the end. There's little "soul-shattering" about this at all. Someone who needs to churn out translations of UN meeting notes day after day isn't doing it for their soul -- they're doing it because it's their job and people of different nationalities can find out what happened in the meeting to do their job.
- lisper 7y ago
  I'm a little surprised to learn that GT is used to translate UN meeting notes, because the right kind of mistake in that context can literally lead to a costly, possibly catastrophic, international incident.
  - crazygringo 7y ago
    Sorry, my experience was at professional translation companies -- I don't know about actual processes at the UN, was just using it as an illustration that translating isn't usually for "art". But I don't see why it should be any different. It's still being cleaned up. The translator knows what they want in the end so the result is the same whether they start with automatic translation or not. Plus, where I worked all translations were always then reviewed by a second translator anyways, because people miss things too -- we're only human. Automatic translation as a first step just speeds things up. It doesn't change the final quality at all.
- irq11 7y ago
  That’s true...people are lazy and costs want to fall, but it’s a little disconcerting in areas that require nuance and detail. I’m by no means a translator, but it isn’t difficult for me to find sentences where Google Translate simply butchers the nuance of Japanese/English conversions. Things like politeness and tone? Gone. Maybe it’s better for closer language pairs, but if a professional translator starts with automated translations for an important document, they’re taking a huge risk. Even as an intermediate speaker, the things I am good at (concept understanding, idomatic speech, politeness, tone) are exactly the things that translation tools are bad at, and correcting the errors often just requires re-writing whole paragraphs from scratch.
mistermann 7y ago
After reading this I can't help but think (due to my fascination with the subject) of the parallels one can observe in modern day polarized political discourse on social and other forms of media. > Whenever I translate, I first read the original text carefully and internalize the ideas as clearly as I can, letting them slosh back and forth in my mind. It’s not that the words of the original are sloshing back and forth; it’s the ideas that are triggering all sorts of related ideas, creating a rich halo of related scenarios in my mind. Needless to say, most of this halo is unconscious. Only when the halo has been evoked sufficiently in my mind do I start to try to express it—to “press it out”—in the second language. I try to say in Language B what strikes me as a natural B-ish way to talk about the kinds of situations that constitute the halo of meaning in question. In any communication between two or more people, verbal or written, there is an ever present translation process going on. Political (and other similar) conversations, despite the communication taking place in the same language (or so we conceptualize it), are subject to the very same AI translation problem Hofstadter notes: the translation of words into ideas. In his case, Hofstadter takes his time, reading the text carefully, "internalizing the ideas as clearly as I can" (~steelmanning). He is explicitly aware of the mind's behavior (ideas, triggering (an incredibly complex and poorly understood process) all sorts of related ideas, creating a rich halo of related scenarios), and that "most of this halo is unconscious". He takes his time, letting the subconscious mind do it's thing. And only then, "when the halo has been evoked sufficiently in my mind", does he put pen to paper to finalize the task of performing an as accurate as possible translation. You can see this same sort of thing happening all over the place in the real world, except unlike Hofstadter, most people are unaware of what is happening under the covers, and lack the explicit and conscious intent to perform an accurate (as possible) translation before setting their fingers on the keyboard to have their say, which will then in turn be inaccurately interpreted (translated from words to ideas, and then processed) by readers, each in their own unique way due to the nature of their personal heuristics and mental model. "Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows." I'd love to find someone of Hofstadter's background and capability who is focusing precisely on this phenomenon. The closest I've come across so far is Jonathan Haidt, and a few people like Eric Weinstein (who often touches on these ideas, but is focused on them to a much lesser degree than Haidt). Any recommendations of others to look into would be appreciated, as would any words of encouragement from people who believe there is actually something important going on here. I believe this, a lack of true mutual understanding of the ideas and beliefs of others, and the lack of intent or desire to do so (if not revulsion toward the very idea (in my perception, speaking of sloshing ideas)), is one of the fundamentally important and mostly overlooked problems in the world today.
lucb1e 7y ago
https://deepl.com https://deepl.com seems to be better at this. I've long been looking for differences, dreading that Google (with its superior amount of money, larger dataset, and perhaps also a larger talent pool) would outperform it on something. It has always been on par so far, often giving word-for-word the same translation. When trying the author's example, however, Deepl actually does it correctly (also outperforming Microsoft Translate, which I threw in for good measure): the manually-translated french turns into correct English. (Not speaking French, I can't judge the french translation it makes.) Now I'm reading this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559633 and this made me curious again: > However, in German, there is no expectation at all that the subject must come first (although it often does). These two German sentences share the same meaning: "Der Hund hat den Ball." and "Den Ball hat der Hund." It totally trips up Google (Den ball hat der Hund -> "the ball has the dog") but Deepl has this sort of silliness for breakfast (Den ball hat der Hund -> "the dog has the ball"). Of course, this is not negating the point of the article: translating is interpreting (or "art", as the author puts it), so deepl still can't be as good as a human. But for edge cases, deepl does seem to be better, at least in these two examples. In real-world cases that I tried so far, as mentioned, I've found it to be 100% equivalent so far (n=20 or so).

95 points by andrepd 7y ago

Douglas Hofstadter is a pompous buffoon. His style is infuriating, pushing his undoubtedly fine intellect in the reader's face. He writes for people who want to believe themselves smarter than most, and the only cost of admission is that they validate Hofstadter's high self-opinion. We all know by the end of the article that Hofstadter is a better translator than Google Translate, but nobody believes that Google Translate is going to match the work of someone who understands the text they are translating. Hofstadter claims he's not cherry-picking difficult examples, but he has chosen two passages where gender is critical, and moved them between languages where gender is expressed in very different ways. It's a tricky part of translation, as Hofstadter knows, and nobody expects a computer to speculate on the intentions of the author of a passage, as you must to successfully translate his examples. Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language --- and that's a great advance. Hofstadter expresses an expectation that no-one holds for an automatic translation tool, shows that Google Translate does not live up to it, and then is satisfied with himself, as usual.

austincheney 7y ago
I got something different out of the article other than offense at education envy.
sorokod 7y ago
Instead of an ad hominem, would you care to address the specific examples sighted in the article?
- JasonFruit 7y ago
  I did a bit, but honestly, my main point is that I can't stand Hofstadter's style, either of writing or thinking. It's not an ad hominem attack to prove some other point; it's intended as a criticism of the man himself.
- watt 7y ago
  I skimmed the article, but it seems the purpose of it would be better served as series of issue reports in the Google Translate bug tracking system than a full article. I think it's not really that interesting to diss the state of the machine translation art in 2019, instead of looking where it could be in 2020, 2025, 2030.
  - andrepd 7y ago
    >issue reports You miss the point. The point is that the "deep" learning approach is fundamentally flawed and will not lead to proper translation no matter how many racks of GPUs you throw at it, since it lacks the "understanding of ideas" required to do it.
arketyp 7y ago
It comes off as quite arrogant of Hofstadter to imply that people believe translation has now been solved by deep learning. You don't even have to be bilingual and know the other language to detect the subtleties lost by machine translation. It would have been interesting to hear the reflections of the Danish speaking friend. I can imagine Frank finds Google Translate practical for simple words that actually are more or less 1-to-1, things you would otherwise look up in a dictionary. And probably his Danish friend can pick up any idioms and such that Google Translate distorts anyway.
- interfixus 7y ago
  I utterly fail to see the point. In all likelihood I would take offense and cut short any further communication, should someone attempt to talk to me through Google [or whatever] Translate (but then, I can barely stand plain Gmail). For what it's worth, Danish actually is my native language.
  - xbmcuser 7y ago
    When I visited Thailand last year most of the apps like Uber and Grab were using Google auto translate in the chats. Made communicating with the car drivers painless. Many people knock these auto translations but after knowing people that can't read English the major language of the internet. I can't look at the translations with the kind of disdain many here seem to feel. As these auto translations open the world to lot more people that were sidelined previously.
ozim 7y ago
The practical utility of Google Translate and similar technologies is undeniable, and probably it’s a good thing overall, but there is still something deeply lacking in the approach, which is conveyed by a single word: understanding. It all boils down to this paragraph, and no one can say it is not true.
- gwern 7y ago
  You certainly can, and that is the biggest problem with this article: a completely lack of interest in understanding what deep learning understands (ironically). Hofstadter, having completely missed the boat on connectionism, committed himself to a failed paradigm, and been wrong about AI time after time (remember when Hofstadter claimed beating humans at chess would require computers to have emotions and be able to write poems?), totally fails to grapple with what NNs do do. For starters, Google Translate is a free service and not necessarily SOTA, even when he wrote this. For example, if you were going to ask 'what do multi-lingual translation seq2seq RNNs (or Transformers) understand?', the immediate obvious thing to discuss would be questions about the 'interlingua' which their embedding yields, things that word embeddings learn (including surprising things like relative locations of cities or sizes of objects), or about transfer learning to tasks that require grammar or reasoning or common-sense like Winograd schemas like in GLUE or SuperGLUE, and how they improve massively over earlier approaches and how they are scaling (one of the most important trends in AI). There is a great deal which could be said here, demonstrating why it works so well and why it doesn't work sometimes, and an AI researcher is just the sort of person to ask. And unfortunately, Hofstadter does none of this and instead bangs on about some errors he found, like it's a total blackbox and understanding is a binary where you either like the same poetry Hofstadter does or you are a cretin, and takes the attitude that any error shows that the approach has failed, is failing, and always will fail because it is 'deeply lacking' (what, exactly? And to think, he complains about 'deep' being abused for rhetorical purposes before and then goes and produces a shallow exercise like this). I thought this was a lousy neo-luddite essay in 2018, and it's only gotten worse since then. In another 10 years, it'll look like Cliff Stoll.
  - deleted 7y ago
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tjpnz 7y ago
>Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language --- and that's a great advance. For some languages it will, they targeted the official working languages of the UN at the time. I hear for them it's pretty good. Personally, I live in Japan and rely on Google Translate every day and my experience has been generally crap. I've seen it get some simpler phrases in Japanese dead wrong and have been noticing it more often the more I learn the language. The part that infuriates me the most is how translations for simple phrases seem to change on an almost daily basis. Not long ago it had a pretty good translation for the formal (keigo) greeting used in business correspondence but as of a few months ago it utterly mangles it. Yes language changes but not this quickly, a lot of these phrases would've been used by the great grandparents of my colleagues.
andrepd 7y ago
>Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language Which is precisely what he says. > Hofstadter expresses an expectation that no-one holds for an automatic translation tool, As demonstrated by the quote at the start, about Russian being just English coded in strange symbols, and also by the unreal hype around "neural networks", plenty of people do on fact hold unrealistic expectations of automatic translation. How many times have you heard someone say translator jobs are going to be automated away in 5 or 10 years? I've heard and read it plenty of times.
gerbilly 7y ago
> but he has chosen two passages where gender is critical, and moved them between languages where gender is expressed in very different ways. So what, if the program can't handle these simple sentences, it can't claim to be a translation program. The machine 'translation' throws away the entire point of the sentence. Why don't we just evolve towards the machines and start speaking to each other in JSON (We should come up with a more efficient way to pronounce '}' as soon as possible!) Most of the AI revolution is just parlour tricks and marketing puffery. Fourth grade children could translate the French sentence better.
vixen99 7y ago
Make a point but better keep the name calling and gross generalizations regarding those who read Hofstadter's output for readers that enjoy that kind of pointless abuse. There are plenty of other outlets for it.
Uhuhreally 7y ago
would you prefer that he hid his light under a bushel ?

crgwbr 7y ago

From my own experience, I’ve found that Google can be a useful tool. But you have to understand the difficult bits of each language you’re translating between and specifically write around them, making the translations tool job a lot easier. E.g. specifically avoid idioms, words with double meanings, etc.

pen2l 7y ago

The trick is not to rely on Google translate for a finished translation, but to use it just as a tool toward reaching that goal. As someone who is learning French these days, it is an absolute boon. One of my favorite things is letting Google auto finish a sentence.... because those auto finished sentences usually tend to be phrases or constructs French speakers use a lot. The other neat thing is that Google shows a check mark near a translation which it feels with high confidence is good — in my experiences those translations really are good and without fault.

asaph 7y ago
> The trick is not to rely on Google translate for a finished translation, but to use it just as a tool toward reaching that goal. This assumes the use case is a translator fluent in the source and target languages translating a passage. The far more common use cases for Google translate are people with near-zero knowledge of either the source or target language and little chance of completing the task successfully.
andrepd 7y ago
He addresses that: >Let me return to that sad image of human translators, soon outdone and outmoded, gradually turning into nothing but quality controllers and text tweakers. That’s a recipe for mediocrity at best. A serious artist doesn’t start with a kitschy piece of error-ridden bilgewater and then patch it up here and there to produce a work of high art. For somebody learning a language, they would be even more easily mislead.
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  It's faster than using a dictionary to look up words one-by-one, and Google's actually integrated a dictionary into the interface. And beginner sentences are well-represented in the corpus so they're relatively unlikely to mislead. Using Google Translate for learning a language could be likened to using training wheels on a bike.
  - Jamwinner 7y ago

oefrha 7y ago

Shallowness is one obvious problem (obvious to any bilingual person). The more troubling problem I’ve noticed is that occasionally it’s inexplicably outright wrong about basic things. Anecdote time. One day in late 2017 (I remember that because of an event), a friend of mine read a Google-translated page in Chinese, and sent it to me (fluent in Chinese) because a statistics was “amazing”. I looked at it, turned out Google translated 万, meaning “ten thousand”, to “million”. Of course the number was unbelievably good. I honestly couldn’t think of how that happened.

danaris 7y ago
I don't know about Chinese, but in Japanese, 万 is frequently used idiomatically in the same way we might in English use "a million"—just to mean "a whole hell of a lot."
- oefrha 7y ago
  You’re right, except it was a statistic like 2.8万, translated to 2.8 million. Your take could point to a possible cause, though, maybe also putting it under the “shallow” category. (Additionally, when 万 is used in Chinese to mean a whole lot, I would translate it to “thousands of” or “tens of thousands of”.)
  - carlmr 7y ago
    Myriad might be the perfect translation then. It comes from Greek for 10,000 and is now routinely used for "a lot" in English.
fsh 7y ago
I once google-translated a russian technical document and it replaced all occurances of "мкВт" (microwatt) with "mW" (milliwatt). Took me a while to figure out why all stated powers were way off.
fenomas 7y ago
I get errors like this from Google Translate all the time. I assume it's because the engine is fully ML (which seems to be good at getting larger grammatical structures but sometimes mistakes individual words), as opposed to some kind of expert system approach (which can easily look up individual words but tends to make soup out of them). As for the error you saw, here's a guess: a million yen is ten thousand dollars, so an ML agent trained on JP/EN text that discusses money might see those numbers crop up a lot in close proximity.

timonoko 7y ago

Did somebody say "shallow"?: https://photos.app.goo.gl/wDy8TQR69iwuGUZb6 https://photos.app.goo.gl/wDy8TQR69iwuGUZb6

clarry 7y ago
The intersection of a donkey and a horse is called a mule or a mule . The mule father is a donkey and the mother is a horse cat, while the mule father is a horse and the mother is a donkey cat. Both junctions are almost always sterile. At the age of two, stallions are driven away from the herd and form their own herds by collecting oaks. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAasi https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... There are four species of wild deer in the wild: deer , wild deer , deer and white-tailed deer . Elk are by far the largest of these species. All species of Finnish deer are game animals . Despite its name, spruce deer do not belong to deer but to deer [2] [5] . It has also been referred to as the deer [4] [5], to distinguish it from the deer ( Cervinae ). The Mammalian Nomenclature Committee has proposed that the sub-tribe be renamed in Finnish to the goats . https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FPeurat https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=htt... The subspecies of Canis aureus lupaster, previously defined as a subspecies of live cabbage in North Africa, originates from South Asian gray matter based on DNA analyzes published in 2011. [18] [19] The North American red wolf ( Rufus ) has also been the subject of scientific debate, for example as a cross between coyote and gray matter. The same genus of wolves as the wolf canis is the goldfish, the warbler , the warbler , the Ethiopian wolf and the coyote , and the dingo , which is nowadays generally classified as a wolf subspecies. The survival of young kittens depends a lot on how many adult wolves and babysitters remain in the herd. Less than half of the wolf catching attempts are successful. A deer or a creepy male stuck in a threatening position is likely to survive, but the fugitive gets the wolves to his feet. The wolf can carry loose pieces of pregnant mother and puppies in the nest or vomit the contents of their stomachs into the puppies. In Central Finland, for example, the formation of new worms has been observed to have led to a reduction in foxes and raccoon dogs and, as a result, to an increase in woodland chicks. [40] This behavior, on the other hand, exposes wolves to infectious diseases in small beasts , especially the wardrobe . https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSusi https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=htt... Whales are also reared as fur animals, known as the blue fox. The bean is most active in the twilight, when it comes up in search of food. Its main food is the fells and, to some extent, the moles . In years when small rodents are scarce, the bean has to deal with birds, their eggs and chicks, and berries and carrion, for example. The situation of the species is particularly poor in Scandinavia and Finland. However, globally, the whale is not endangered. According to a report published in 2008, the stock of nuts is gradually gaining ground in the Nordic countries . In Finland, the whale is classified as extremely endangered . [5] As a popular fur animal , in the twentieth century, wild white fox was hunted almost extinct in Finland. Even in the early 20th century, the species was abundant in Lapland, and during the winter of 1908-1909, whales migrated all the way to the southern coast of the country. Attempts have been made to improve the livelihood of Naal by hunting foxes and providing the nipples with nourishment and other food. [12] [13] In Norway and Sweden, dogfish are fed on dogfish, which has contributed to the growth of the stock. [7] The survival of nails is also hampered by the fact that they are no longer provided with enough reindeer kills for wolves and wolves. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffi.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FNaali https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fi&tl=en&u=htt... fi->en translations are so funny that I read them when I'm feeling down. Few other things make me laugh out loud so much. Part of me hopes they never invent a better way to translate.

robomartin 7y ago

I’ll equate this to being critical of any early technology as if no further development will happen. Translation, good translation, is not easy. If it were, it would have been a solved problem years ago. And, yes, some languages pose more challenges than others. I often have to write the same text in multiple languages. I usually write in English and use Google Translate to quickly generate a rough draft translation in other languages, say, Spanish. I then copy-paste the translation, proofread and edit. It is a huge time saver. Aside from not having to re-write the material, the cognitive load of the proofreading and editing process is significantly lower.

glenstein 7y ago
I guess the right things to take from the article are (1) the validity of the criticism, as a legitimate face value observation, but also as a way of sketching the kinds of problems and areas where we hope for progress and (2) the fact that Google Translate is nevertheless useful in its current form. I think his overall thesis isn't a declaration that no further progress will be possible, but that it may have to draw from resources that are more than just statistical associations of words - things like interior human experiences. So it would not just measure words against surrounding passages, but against some understanding of concept generation that emerges from human subjectivity. And, this is where I think a fuse blows for many people, things get complicated, circuits fry, and people find themselves filled with an urge to declare"well, computers just CAN'T do X." But I think what Hofstadter is saying is that it is a hard problem but also the kind of thing that in principle could be done to make progress on translation.
- robomartin 7y ago
  Achieving human-level understanding is the canonical problem in AI. I think I can say we don’t yet know how to encode and represent this thing called understanding. We are excellent at classification and sub-par at understanding, with translation being just one of the many application domains that will benefit when we go through the understanding inflection point.
uryga 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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laichzeit0 7y ago

I really hate pieces like this. Hofstadter should know better than anyone how state-of-the-art machine translation works. Only absolute laymen would use words like “understanding” to describe what’s going on. It’s really good, and we’re a lot further than we were 10 years ago but honest to god people should just drop using anthropomorphic laden terms like “understanding” and “intelligence” into these discussions. The I in AI is unfortunately taken too literally. Maybe just do yourself a favor and watch the videos to CS224 [1] and then you’d be less surprised that these systems do not “understand” (whatever the hell that even means, unless rigorously defined). [1] http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224n/ http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224n/

glenstein 7y ago

Hofstadter is trying to draw a conceptual distinction between "understanding" (generating language by drawing from a full interiority of human subjective experience), and mere "translation" (based on looking at words). But analyzing how words are used is a great way of working backward into something that gets closer and closer to human subjectivity. Some neural net trained on how words are used would start to model concepts that reflect "under the hood" human experiences that generate language. Maybe it's not 'enough', and a robust translation engine would have a sense of irony, jealousy, favorite foods, etc that it would need to rely on to translate things, and maybe that set of concepts to be obtained via something other than training on words. But I don't think there's a clear conceptual line to be drawn. Studying the way we use words can get us a loose approximation, maybe even a good one.

Mathnerd314 7y ago
The Chinese example at the end where he had to look up the phrase himself (on Google) is particularly revealing. Humans don't have any more insight into words than the machine. They're just better at interpreting explanations written by humans and intended for humans.

coldtea 7y ago

>In this scenario, human translators would become, within a few years, mere quality controllers and glitch fixers, rather than producers of fresh new text. Such a development would cause a soul-shattering upheaval in my mental life. Although I fully understand the fascination of trying to get machines to translate well, I am not in the least eager to see human translators replaced by inanimate machines. Indeed, the idea frightens and revolts me. To my mind, translation is an incredibly subtle art that draws constantly on one’s many years of experience in life, and on one’s creative imagination. Well, there's another way to achieve the same effect, by turning anything written or spoken into such trivial BS, that any old translation will do. When nuance is not appreciated or delivered, then you don't need to translate nuance. When literature is replaced by skimming online articles, there's no much nuance to begin with.

cptskippy 7y ago
I don't think you're wrong and there is still many valid use cases for machine translation. There are many situations where text should not be nuanced or contain subtlety, like business signage or instructions. It should be clear and direct, however people often want to convey frustration either actively or passively. Often people want to be playful around awkward or uncomfortable messaging. And there are times when they want to appear humble.

lowdose 7y ago

I lately think the auto translation on youtube is better than on google.

fizixer 7y ago

If I'm not wrong, this is a continuation of Hofstadter's critique of the "new AI" (i.e., AI boom since 2006 based on machine learning) and how it is at odds with his conception of what needs to be done in order to move towards AGI based on ideas surrounding his book Godel, Escher, Bach [1]. For context, please read this in light of the 2013 piece in The Atlantic [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man...

crazygringo 7y ago

> that human translators may be an endangered species. In this scenario, human translators would become, within a few years, mere quality controllers and glitch fixers, rather than producers of fresh new text. Huh? As someone who's worked in translation briefly before, that's already the case and has been for at least a decade -- at least for written material that's not "art" (literature, poetry). It's far faster for professional translators to run something through Google Translate or similar and then clean it up, than type it out from scratch. And identical quality in the end. There's little "soul-shattering" about this at all. Someone who needs to churn out translations of UN meeting notes day after day isn't doing it for their soul -- they're doing it because it's their job and people of different nationalities can find out what happened in the meeting to do their job.

lisper 7y ago
I'm a little surprised to learn that GT is used to translate UN meeting notes, because the right kind of mistake in that context can literally lead to a costly, possibly catastrophic, international incident.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  Sorry, my experience was at professional translation companies -- I don't know about actual processes at the UN, was just using it as an illustration that translating isn't usually for "art". But I don't see why it should be any different. It's still being cleaned up. The translator knows what they want in the end so the result is the same whether they start with automatic translation or not. Plus, where I worked all translations were always then reviewed by a second translator anyways, because people miss things too -- we're only human. Automatic translation as a first step just speeds things up. It doesn't change the final quality at all.
irq11 7y ago
That’s true...people are lazy and costs want to fall, but it’s a little disconcerting in areas that require nuance and detail. I’m by no means a translator, but it isn’t difficult for me to find sentences where Google Translate simply butchers the nuance of Japanese/English conversions. Things like politeness and tone? Gone. Maybe it’s better for closer language pairs, but if a professional translator starts with automated translations for an important document, they’re taking a huge risk. Even as an intermediate speaker, the things I am good at (concept understanding, idomatic speech, politeness, tone) are exactly the things that translation tools are bad at, and correcting the errors often just requires re-writing whole paragraphs from scratch.

mistermann 7y ago

After reading this I can't help but think (due to my fascination with the subject) of the parallels one can observe in modern day polarized political discourse on social and other forms of media. > Whenever I translate, I first read the original text carefully and internalize the ideas as clearly as I can, letting them slosh back and forth in my mind. It’s not that the words of the original are sloshing back and forth; it’s the ideas that are triggering all sorts of related ideas, creating a rich halo of related scenarios in my mind. Needless to say, most of this halo is unconscious. Only when the halo has been evoked sufficiently in my mind do I start to try to express it—to “press it out”—in the second language. I try to say in Language B what strikes me as a natural B-ish way to talk about the kinds of situations that constitute the halo of meaning in question. In any communication between two or more people, verbal or written, there is an ever present translation process going on. Political (and other similar) conversations, despite the communication taking place in the same language (or so we conceptualize it), are subject to the very same AI translation problem Hofstadter notes: the translation of words into ideas. In his case, Hofstadter takes his time, reading the text carefully, "internalizing the ideas as clearly as I can" (~steelmanning). He is explicitly aware of the mind's behavior (ideas, triggering (an incredibly complex and poorly understood process) all sorts of related ideas, creating a rich halo of related scenarios), and that "most of this halo is unconscious". He takes his time, letting the subconscious mind do it's thing. And only then, "when the halo has been evoked sufficiently in my mind", does he put pen to paper to finalize the task of performing an as accurate as possible translation. You can see this same sort of thing happening all over the place in the real world, except unlike Hofstadter, most people are unaware of what is happening under the covers, and lack the explicit and conscious intent to perform an accurate (as possible) translation before setting their fingers on the keyboard to have their say, which will then in turn be inaccurately interpreted (translated from words to ideas, and then processed) by readers, each in their own unique way due to the nature of their personal heuristics and mental model. "Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows." I'd love to find someone of Hofstadter's background and capability who is focusing precisely on this phenomenon. The closest I've come across so far is Jonathan Haidt, and a few people like Eric Weinstein (who often touches on these ideas, but is focused on them to a much lesser degree than Haidt). Any recommendations of others to look into would be appreciated, as would any words of encouragement from people who believe there is actually something important going on here. I believe this, a lack of true mutual understanding of the ideas and beliefs of others, and the lack of intent or desire to do so (if not revulsion toward the very idea (in my perception, speaking of sloshing ideas)), is one of the fundamentally important and mostly overlooked problems in the world today.

lucb1e 7y ago

https://deepl.com https://deepl.com seems to be better at this. I've long been looking for differences, dreading that Google (with its superior amount of money, larger dataset, and perhaps also a larger talent pool) would outperform it on something. It has always been on par so far, often giving word-for-word the same translation. When trying the author's example, however, Deepl actually does it correctly (also outperforming Microsoft Translate, which I threw in for good measure): the manually-translated french turns into correct English. (Not speaking French, I can't judge the french translation it makes.) Now I'm reading this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559633 and this made me curious again: > However, in German, there is no expectation at all that the subject must come first (although it often does). These two German sentences share the same meaning: "Der Hund hat den Ball." and "Den Ball hat der Hund." It totally trips up Google (Den ball hat der Hund -> "the ball has the dog") but Deepl has this sort of silliness for breakfast (Den ball hat der Hund -> "the dog has the ball"). Of course, this is not negating the point of the article: translating is interpreting (or "art", as the author puts it), so deepl still can't be as good as a human. But for edge cases, deepl does seem to be better, at least in these two examples. In real-world cases that I tried so far, as mentioned, I've found it to be 100% equivalent so far (n=20 or so).