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I remember 25 years ago in grad school, when I was getting my PhD and working on Natural Language Processing, a conversation with a fellow grad student who was

I remember 25 years ago in grad school, when I was getting my PhD and working on Natural Language Processing, a conversation with a fellow grad student who was studying and teaching French, and planning to work as a translator. She said: "So you guys are trying to put me out of a job?" I laughed and reassured her, because we were then still a few years off from even the easiest doesn't-have-to-be-great automated translations being any good, and was confident that while the simpler stuff would get picked off and the machines might be able to make some first-pass translations (that would actually help the working human translators), the demand would always be there for good, accurate, idiomatic translation that's not going to drop in some weird thing in the middle and confuse someone or mess up a negotiation, and that kind of automated translation seemed like it would not arrive in our lifetimes. I still think so. Good translation is AI-complete. Anyway, so, that seems relevant here.

dhosek 4y ago
I’ve been digging through Google translate (Hebrew to English) results from transcripts of Holocaust survivor testimonies, mostly looking to see if there’s any useful information for my writing project (I started with 17 candidate testimonies, removed 7 without transcripts and the last ten gave me just a couple kind of useful details, but nowhere near the wealth I’d hoped for when I started out but I’m glad I hadn’t spent a hundred hours trying to follow the original Hebrew or even scan the transcripts in Hebrew). There were some fairly comical mistranslations in the GT output. My favorite was where GT had the interviewer at one point say to the survivor, “What’s wrong with you?” which I imagined the interviewer saying in a disgusted tone. There was also another point where GT said the interviewer asked the survivor, “How do you say shit?” On the other hand, the results I’ve seen for Western European languages (German, French, Spanish) have been pretty amazing. Even Polish, while not perfect, came out pretty intelligible from GT.
- zvr 4y ago
  You should check https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator if you want to be impressed with results for Western European languages (and some others, even Greek!). No Hebrew (yet?) though.

dhosek 4y ago

I’ve been digging through Google translate (Hebrew to English) results from transcripts of Holocaust survivor testimonies, mostly looking to see if there’s any useful information for my writing project (I started with 17 candidate testimonies, removed 7 without transcripts and the last ten gave me just a couple kind of useful details, but nowhere near the wealth I’d hoped for when I started out but I’m glad I hadn’t spent a hundred hours trying to follow the original Hebrew or even scan the transcripts in Hebrew). There were some fairly comical mistranslations in the GT output. My favorite was where GT had the interviewer at one point say to the survivor, “What’s wrong with you?” which I imagined the interviewer saying in a disgusted tone. There was also another point where GT said the interviewer asked the survivor, “How do you say shit?” On the other hand, the results I’ve seen for Western European languages (German, French, Spanish) have been pretty amazing. Even Polish, while not perfect, came out pretty intelligible from GT.

zvr 4y ago
You should check https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator if you want to be impressed with results for Western European languages (and some others, even Greek!). No Hebrew (yet?) though.