2 ms·

Note that "more convincing" isn't necessarily a good thing; the deception of fluency can totally be used to convince you of something wrong.

lucb1e 4y ago
I've had good experiences with deepl, but certainly a good point. Translating definitely has an interpretation aspect to it. I'd be curious if anyone tried tricky texts on different translators and how they fared. I'm not enough of a linguist myself to know of different categories of tricks (to give a fair assessment rather than things randomly coming to mind), or what even the jargon for such things would be to look them up.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  Well, this went around my circles the other day: https://twitter.com/Xythar/status/1405660710382706694 https://twitter.com/Xythar/status/1405660710382706694 It turns out that the "tricks" don't necessarily have to get very sophisticated, because, well, the target user of machine translation services can't understand the source text. (I mean, the fr-en language pair is probably better off than ja-en, but I don't know enough French to know whether it can be trusted!)
  - Mordisquitos 4y ago
    I'm not sure what to make of this.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - lucb1e 4y ago
    > in truth it's like 10 times more likely to just make complete shit up if it doesn't understand the source I use this to learn German. Instead of translating a text EN->DE and not practicing any writing skills, I'll write my best attempt at German and see if it's understandable by running it through the DE->EN or DE->NL translator. (In cases where I care about the quality, I'll then patch up the English/Dutch if necessary, run it NL/EN->DE, and use that version.) For this purpose, I'm glad that it makes a best guess at what my broken German must mean, and it usually does a fair job (easy to say because I know what I meant, so no validation issues there). Of course this is not great for every use-case, for example it would be better if it additionally displayed confidence (e.g. slightly graying out subsentences below 80% confidence), but it also has advantages to make a good guess at the meaning of the source. And when I put in something unintelligible, unintelligible stuff comes out. It's not really just making something up, at least not in my experience with EN/DE/NL. No idea what happened there with that Japanese example.
  - mananaysiempre 4y ago
    As an aside, there seems to have been a dramatic change in Google Translate’s underlying approach several years ago: before it, the fr>en and zh>en translations were reasonable (if stilted and occasionally ungrammatical) while both de>en and ja>en absolutely sucked (just made no sense whatsoever over groups of more than three or so words); I suspect the difficulty being the “global” transformations needed to translate SOV to SVO word order. It would be very interesting to know what they did (there are old-style statistical approaches that involve learning pairs of corresponding syntax trees, but I didn’t get the impression they were practical? might have been an artifact of the original DoD research being focused on zh and ru, which are both SVO—though ar is VSO and fa is SOV...).
  - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4y ago
    That reminds of a gem that I've found recently. Google Translate translates this Lithuanian sentence from Wikipedia: Adomas Bernardas Mickevičius (lenk. Adam Bernard Mickiewicz, 1798 m. gruodžio 24 d. Zaosėje, netoli Naugarduko – 1855 m. lapkričio 26 d. Konstantinopolyje, Osmanų imperija) – iš istorinės Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės kilęs, lenkų kalba rašęs poetas, dramaturgas, eseistas as: Adam Bernard Mickiewicz (Polish: Adam Bernard Mickiewicz, December 24, 1798 in Zaos, near Novgorod, Constantinople, November 26, 1855, Ottoman Empire) - a Polish-born poet, playwright, essayist Remove the last word (eseistas) and suddenly "Polish-born poet, playwright" turns into "a poet and playwright from the historical Grand Duchy of Lithuania who wrote in Polish". It should be noted that Mickiewicz's nationality is somewhat of a controversial topic.

lucb1e 4y ago

I've had good experiences with deepl, but certainly a good point. Translating definitely has an interpretation aspect to it. I'd be curious if anyone tried tricky texts on different translators and how they fared. I'm not enough of a linguist myself to know of different categories of tricks (to give a fair assessment rather than things randomly coming to mind), or what even the jargon for such things would be to look them up.

naniwaduni 4y ago
Well, this went around my circles the other day: https://twitter.com/Xythar/status/1405660710382706694 https://twitter.com/Xythar/status/1405660710382706694 It turns out that the "tricks" don't necessarily have to get very sophisticated, because, well, the target user of machine translation services can't understand the source text. (I mean, the fr-en language pair is probably better off than ja-en, but I don't know enough French to know whether it can be trusted!)
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  I'm not sure what to make of this.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- lucb1e 4y ago
  > in truth it's like 10 times more likely to just make complete shit up if it doesn't understand the source I use this to learn German. Instead of translating a text EN->DE and not practicing any writing skills, I'll write my best attempt at German and see if it's understandable by running it through the DE->EN or DE->NL translator. (In cases where I care about the quality, I'll then patch up the English/Dutch if necessary, run it NL/EN->DE, and use that version.) For this purpose, I'm glad that it makes a best guess at what my broken German must mean, and it usually does a fair job (easy to say because I know what I meant, so no validation issues there). Of course this is not great for every use-case, for example it would be better if it additionally displayed confidence (e.g. slightly graying out subsentences below 80% confidence), but it also has advantages to make a good guess at the meaning of the source. And when I put in something unintelligible, unintelligible stuff comes out. It's not really just making something up, at least not in my experience with EN/DE/NL. No idea what happened there with that Japanese example.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  As an aside, there seems to have been a dramatic change in Google Translate’s underlying approach several years ago: before it, the fr>en and zh>en translations were reasonable (if stilted and occasionally ungrammatical) while both de>en and ja>en absolutely sucked (just made no sense whatsoever over groups of more than three or so words); I suspect the difficulty being the “global” transformations needed to translate SOV to SVO word order. It would be very interesting to know what they did (there are old-style statistical approaches that involve learning pairs of corresponding syntax trees, but I didn’t get the impression they were practical? might have been an artifact of the original DoD research being focused on zh and ru, which are both SVO—though ar is VSO and fa is SOV...).
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4y ago
  That reminds of a gem that I've found recently. Google Translate translates this Lithuanian sentence from Wikipedia: Adomas Bernardas Mickevičius (lenk. Adam Bernard Mickiewicz, 1798 m. gruodžio 24 d. Zaosėje, netoli Naugarduko – 1855 m. lapkričio 26 d. Konstantinopolyje, Osmanų imperija) – iš istorinės Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės kilęs, lenkų kalba rašęs poetas, dramaturgas, eseistas as: Adam Bernard Mickiewicz (Polish: Adam Bernard Mickiewicz, December 24, 1798 in Zaos, near Novgorod, Constantinople, November 26, 1855, Ottoman Empire) - a Polish-born poet, playwright, essayist Remove the last word (eseistas) and suddenly "Polish-born poet, playwright" turns into "a poet and playwright from the historical Grand Duchy of Lithuania who wrote in Polish". It should be noted that Mickiewicz's nationality is somewhat of a controversial topic.