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Shallowness is one obvious problem (obvious to any bilingual person). The more troubling problem I’ve noticed is that occasionally it’s inexplicably outright wr
by 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 agoI 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 agoYou’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 agoMyriad 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 agoI 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 agoI 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.
- malaya_zemlya 7y agoMy favourite glitch in Translate happened around 2008, where in the en/ru pair it translated Bush as Путин (Putin) and Putin as Буш (Bush). The reason was apparently that in the training corpus, where the English version said something like "Bush met with Putin", the Russian version tended to say "Putin met with Bush"
- sorokod 7y ago"pelosi met with trump" is translated incorrectly to Russian as "Пелоси встретился с Трампом" The Russian verb is incorrectly in masculine form. Interestingly both names are capitalised in translation
- watt 7y agoThe verb is "incorrectly" used only if you assume that "pelosi" implicitly refers to female politician "Nancy Pelosi". You might infer that if Nancy was recently in the news, but that's a hard leap.
- sorokod 7y agoDon't need to assume anything, it was my text snippet and pelosi did refer to a female polition. A contemporary human translator would reasonably default to the feminine form without further context.