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Google Translate is surprisingly bad when you try to do real work with it, especially its community verified corrections which are guaranteed to be worse. In Sp

Google Translate is surprisingly bad when you try to do real work with it, especially its community verified corrections which are guaranteed to be worse. In Spanish, community verified translations never have accents. Chatgpt and DeepL are both better. They understand context much better and more likely use real expressions over literal translations.

potatolicious 4y ago
+1, especially when it comes to localizing UI text. The trick with UI text is that in many languages it's not grammatically correct to begin with (GUI labels are rarely expressed in full sentences), and the terseness introduces vast amounts of ambiguity in meaning. Like take a "Submit" button - it can mean anything from "send this request in" to "grovel in front of me" depending on context. Human localizers struggle with this, especially when the source files they're provided with do not have sufficient context (and they cannot see the GUI in-context) to infer meaning. Existing translation engines are worse.
- koreth1 4y ago
  > Human localizers struggle with this, especially when the source files they're provided with do not have sufficient context (and they cannot see the GUI in-context) to infer meaning. And sometimes the lack of context is self-inflicted. My company just started evaluating translation services and as part of that process, we sent some of our strings to the candidate companies. Many of our strings are in Java properties files, which we've annotated with comments to give context. Yesterday I got a request back from one of them: please convert the strings to a JSON file. Which is on some level the equivalent of, please strip out all the comments you added for our benefit. Yes, I get that our strings will be fed into translation software. But still, we made the effort to give them context and they told us to get rid of it.
holoduke 4y ago
We are processing about 50 million words per day for about 12 languages. I can tell from experience that google translate is giving the best results. It similarly prices to deepl. We explored the idea of using chatgpt, but its extremely expensive compared to google/deepl 500.000 words for +-20 dollars versus a lot more with chatgpt.
- petodo 4y ago
  That's first time I hear someone would be praising Gtranslate, while they improved recently and they are catching up with DeepL, DeepL is still by far superior to GT, everything else is in completely different league (i don't have experience with ChstGPT). Btw. Reverso should be using same neural model as DeepL and provides also interesting results, though both DeepL and GT are superior to Reverso.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  A translation tool like PoEdit can mass translate a bunch of text strings using a few different services. It's the simplest demonstration of the lower quality of Google Translate vs. DeepL at least for shorter strings. GTranslate rarely knows how a native speaker would say short phrases and concepts, preferring to translate them literally. I'm surprised you haven't run into problems with community verified translations. They're so predictably poor that I'd stop using GTranslate just to avoid that.

potatolicious 4y ago

+1, especially when it comes to localizing UI text. The trick with UI text is that in many languages it's not grammatically correct to begin with (GUI labels are rarely expressed in full sentences), and the terseness introduces vast amounts of ambiguity in meaning. Like take a "Submit" button - it can mean anything from "send this request in" to "grovel in front of me" depending on context. Human localizers struggle with this, especially when the source files they're provided with do not have sufficient context (and they cannot see the GUI in-context) to infer meaning. Existing translation engines are worse.

koreth1 4y ago
> Human localizers struggle with this, especially when the source files they're provided with do not have sufficient context (and they cannot see the GUI in-context) to infer meaning. And sometimes the lack of context is self-inflicted. My company just started evaluating translation services and as part of that process, we sent some of our strings to the candidate companies. Many of our strings are in Java properties files, which we've annotated with comments to give context. Yesterday I got a request back from one of them: please convert the strings to a JSON file. Which is on some level the equivalent of, please strip out all the comments you added for our benefit. Yes, I get that our strings will be fed into translation software. But still, we made the effort to give them context and they told us to get rid of it.

holoduke 4y ago

We are processing about 50 million words per day for about 12 languages. I can tell from experience that google translate is giving the best results. It similarly prices to deepl. We explored the idea of using chatgpt, but its extremely expensive compared to google/deepl 500.000 words for +-20 dollars versus a lot more with chatgpt.

petodo 4y ago
That's first time I hear someone would be praising Gtranslate, while they improved recently and they are catching up with DeepL, DeepL is still by far superior to GT, everything else is in completely different league (i don't have experience with ChstGPT). Btw. Reverso should be using same neural model as DeepL and provides also interesting results, though both DeepL and GT are superior to Reverso.
hombre_fatal 4y ago
A translation tool like PoEdit can mass translate a bunch of text strings using a few different services. It's the simplest demonstration of the lower quality of Google Translate vs. DeepL at least for shorter strings. GTranslate rarely knows how a native speaker would say short phrases and concepts, preferring to translate them literally. I'm surprised you haven't run into problems with community verified translations. They're so predictably poor that I'd stop using GTranslate just to avoid that.