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Has Google Translate been fixed yet?
- bitxbitxbitcoin 3y agoSurprised the tomatoes isn’t rubbish.
- sfmike 3y agogoogle maps also in taiwan made me ride on the highway on a motorbike which isn't allowed and got a nice ticket for following googles directions even with avoid highways enabled.
- komali2 3y agoGoogle maps is particularly useless in this sense. I desperately wish they'd open source it so local could just add features as needed. In Taiwan, we don't have "highway," "motorcycle roads," etc, as Google understands it (with its notoriously difficult to activate "motorcycle route option"). There's specific rules that should be just implemented by name, flags like "no flower road," "no highspeed highway (red plate and car OK, yellow and below not ok)", no "highspeed highway (red, yellow, car ok, white and green plate not ok)," or maybe just "white scooter only" or even "greenplate only" routes modes. Better if you could just input your exact vehicle type per Taiwan law and get a legal route that way. The information is quite available on data.gov.tw for those that want to have machines read it. Can't speak for other countries. This on top of the fact that I'm pretty sure google maps uses some USA centric constant for traffic light timer estimations. Traffic light timers are very, very long in Taiwan compared to other countries. One time I had to wait 500 seconds (they had to add an extra big countdown timer to account for this). Usually it's more than 99 (the maximum the 2 digit counters can display). When you're in a car, motorcycle, or scooter, it's safe to multiply travel times by 1.5x to 2x. As for bicycle, I have no idea why google thinks bicycling is so fast in Taipei, but always multiply by at least 2x whatever time Google tells you. Edit: the 500 seconds was an extreme outlier. Around 99 seconds is the usual in major Taipei intersections.
- pests 3y agoAre you really waiting up to almost 10 minutes at a light?
- londons_explore 3y agoThat can make sense when you're coming from a tiny side road onto a major busy highway. It doesn't make sense to delay thousands of cars on the highway by 30 seconds so that one car can cross it a few minutes faster. Better to make that one car wait 10 mins (and perhaps by now it is a queue of 3 cars), and save 30 seconds * thousands on the main road. Other countries normally build bridges or highway merges to avoid this problem.
- izacus 3y agoGoogle Maps did make you do anything. It's a dumb tool that is not always correct made by people in USA. You decided to forgo basic due diligence in a foreign country.
- withinboredom 3y agoLooks like Bing Translate in Edge works just fine.
- throwing_away 3y agodeepl is the best at the moment IMO
- raincole 3y agoTaiwanese here. I have a mixed opinion about this site. Some of them are just weird: - mega → 巨型 (百萬) Really? Do you really want to translate mega to 百萬 (million) in every context? *Edit: every, not any - text → 文本 (文字) Seriously? 文本 is the formal, academic way to say it, even in Taiwan. Have this person never been any academic environment? - through → 通過 (透過) Seriously???
- Sniffnoy 3y ago> Really? Do you really want to translate mega to 百萬 (million) in any context? Would its use as a metric prefix not be a correct context for this?
- raincole 3y agoMy point is this site doesn't provide any context. It's very weird to say "mega should be translated to 兆/百萬/超級/巨型" without specifying the context first. A Reddit "megathread" is definitely not a 百萬討論串. *Edit: my word choice was wrong in the parent comment. I meant to say "every context", not "any context".
- ben_w 3y agoLiteral translations often have that problem, and even human translators need context. The initial comment looked like there wasn't any context, which means "mega" could just as easily mean «SI million prefix» as «huge». In written English, the word "minute" in isolation and without context may be the noun for the time period of 60 seconds, or it may be the adjective «very small».
- jachee 3y agoAnd even if it is representing a moment of time, it may not be representing exactly sixty seconds. It could in fact be an idiom representing an indeterminate longer interval: This particular usage has been around, colloquially, for a minute.
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- MarcusE1W 3y agoI think DeepL is considered to be quite good for translations nowadays https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator
- isaacfrond 3y agoIt doesn't support Traditional Chinese though, let alone the Taiwanese dialect...
- sgt 3y agoSeems better but it's definitely easy to spot when something has been machine translated, even when using DeepL. Did a test now and if you translate from English into a target language, the corresponding text is definitely not the way a native speaker would formulate it.
- input_sh 3y agoIt currently supports exactly 4 non-European languages. It won't be a proper Google Translate alternative until it supports at least 3x as many languages.
- brational 3y agoTheir Spanish-English is significantly more idiomatic than google but as others have said - far fewer languages supported. But I suspect deepl will continue to be better than google as they grow.
- ksec 3y agoThat is on the basic assumption those are incorrect and required to be "fixed". What makes you think Google "would" fix it? Facebook has sided with Mainland China during 2019 protest in Hong Kong simply because there are more Chinese working inside Facebook than people from HK. Youtube has sided with mainland China to censor words in Chinese comments simply because the censorship team employ, of course Chinese. Just because Google doesn't operate in China, doesn't mean its influence are not there. ( Don't even get me started on Apple about its supply chains )
- komali2 3y agoIt's incorrect per the language code they're using, zh-tw. They obviously side with the CPC on political issues, but that's a separate issue, they should just change the code to the more accurate "zh-Hant." zh-tw exists to specifically identify Taiwanese Mandarin, which is a defined separate dialect (we really should stop using "Chinese" as a word to describe the various flavors of Mandarin, let alone including entirely different languages (NOT dialects!) such as Hakka, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Ninghainese, etc).
- zarzavat 3y agoGoogle does not use a language code in the UI. They describe the language as “Chinese (Traditional)”, which could mean anything. The URL contains a language code, but that’s just an internal implementation detail.
- goblin89 3y agoGoogle should rid itself of the notion that “Traditional Chinese” and “Simplified Chinese” are anything but complete misnomers if you’re talking about languages. They are scripts, and scripts don’t have a 1:1 mapping to languages. Imagine a world in which Google Translate has one entry called “Latin” for anything using Latin script (Welsh, Irish, you name it) and another entry “Simplified Latin” for English. Just like that, translation “from TC to TC” (e.g., Cantonese to Hakka) is very much a thing!
- danwee 3y agoI'm using ChatGPT... who needs Google for translation? Either you know a little bit the target language and you are able to spot wrong translations (both in Google translate and ChatGPT) or you don't know enough about the target language and you trust the translation that is given to you (and in this case, ChatGPT is probably giving you a better translation)
- 4cao 3y agoThing is, Google forces their translations upon everyone. For example if I want to check Taipei restaurant reviews on Google Maps with my interface language set to English, each of them shows up translated (poorly), and I have to click or tap every time to "see the original." Translation quality is one issue, e.g. "加油！" being translated to 'add oil!' instead of something like 'keep up the good work!' which is what it is supposed to mean in this context figuratively. But there is also a bigger cultural issue in that Google developers do not allow for people being multilingual: just because I made a choice for the interface language doesn't mean I need everything else translated to it (with no opt-out).
- colordrops 3y agoIsn't ChatGPT better than Google translate or deepl? Why doesn't google use a modern LLM to translate?
- mrazomor 3y agoBecause Google nor any other company is rich enough to use LLMs at that scale. Consider the quality vs. cost per query & latency trade off.
- londons_explore 3y agoChatGPT is a transformer model. Google pioneered transformer models specifically for translation. If ChatGPT outperforms google translate, I'd guess it's simply because chatGPT is a bigger model with more training data.
- danwee 3y agoMust be something else, don't you think? If there's a company in the world who can just "adjust their model to make it bigger" that's Google. But they haven't done so. Perhaps Google doesn't care.
- londons_explore 3y agoGoogle Translate is a relatively small product with a relatively small budget. It doesn't bring in a huge amount of users or revenue. The engineers working on it seem to be focussing on supporting small languages (ie. languages that only a few million people speak - africa and india have lots of those, both big growth markets). They're also working on better apps - for example being to translate text inside images, text from a video feed, live translation of captions, etc. It makes sense that they probably wouldn't be deploying a huge chunk of compute there to get a few marginal quality gains.
- glandium 3y agoIronically, the amount of training data in non-English languages for ChatGPT is tiny. In the order of 10% for all of them (IIRC).
- eric_khun 3y agoI now use chatGPT for translating english to traditional Chinese and give me some variations. Definitely works better than Google translate. For example for "I want to build a good gym routine": 我想建立一個良好的健身計畫。 Wǒ xiǎng jiànlì yīgè liánghǎo de jiànshēn jìhuà. Here are some variations of the sentence along with their English translations: 我想制定一套有效的健身計劃。 Wǒ xiǎng zhìdìng yī tào yǒuxiào de jiànshēn jìhuà. I want to create an effective workout plan. 我希望安排一個健康的健身日程。 Wǒ xīwàng ānpái yīgè jiànkāng de jiànshēn rìchéng. I hope to set up a healthy fitness schedule. ps: I am building an app to make learning chinese easier. Feel free to ping me privately for testing :)
- Tistron 3y agoI also do this with translations between Swedish, Danish and English. I find it fascinating that chatGPT is better at translating (a lot better) than a tool specifically built for it, when (if I understand correctly) chatGPT was in no way designed to translate, and is only in some way predicting text, one word at a time. How come google hasn't leveraged better existing tech to make the translations better? Is it too computationally expensive?
- josephg 3y agoThe Google translate offline translation datasets are absolutely tiny - like, 20mb in size for French. Obviously this is heavily quantised and so on, but it’s not that surprising that a 30-60+ billion parameter language model outcompetes Google translate handily. I assume you’re right - that Google translate hasn’t been updated to take advantage of much bigger, more computationally complex models. I suppose for direct translation it’s probably not needed, but being able to ask chatgpt to explain the translation (and any cultural nuances involved) is a game changer when you’re trying to learn a language.
- OJFord 3y agoBut they could easily be using a larger dataset online? Which goes two ways: maybe this line of reasoning doesn't mean anything; or well yes exactly, but why so small online when they have all this space and also offer Bard.
- Aachen 3y ago> A lot of times the translation would sound like how Chinese is used in China instead. Ignorant person here (sorry if I'm asking a dumb question), but given the larger population of China to Taiwan, why is that not the correct thing to do? Or is this "Traditional Chinese" a language spoken only in Taiwan? When translating to Dutch, I wouldn't expect it to output Dutch as it is spoken in Belgium, Suriname, or Limburg either; I'd expect it to output Dutch as the main body of speakers speak it. They should get their own language designation instead, if the software wants to support translating into variants of the language
- junon 3y ago> given the larger population of China to Taiwan Taiwan is its own country. India has a similar population to China. Why not just translate into Urdu or Tamil instead, by that logic?
- Aachen 3y agoPlease read the rest of the comment. I was assuming that what is called "Traditional Chinese" is used in China, based on its name (Chinese) and that GTranslate outputs it. Urdu and Tamil aren't spoken in China and isn't what GTranslate outputs when you select a Chinese language, afaik
- Y_Y 3y agoBear in mind that Taiwan (the country) also calls itself China, and so did the rest of the world until the seventies.
- Aachen 3y agoWhat do people living in Taiwan call the 'other' China? Is "mainland China" a correct thing to say, or is the word "main" there implying that Taiwan is lesser and not an equal/peer state? I used the word China in other comments because I didn't know what to call it otherwise, hoping that in the context of Taiwan it is clear what I mean
- DiogenesKynikos 3y agoThis is an interesting issue. Simplified and Traditional are different (but closely related) writing systems that can be used to express the exact same text. They are not different linguistic variants of Chinese. It looks like regardless of which writing system you choose, Google still translates into the most widely used variant of Chinese: Standard Chinese, as spoken on the mainland. It just writes the result using the requested characters. It doesn't decide to use more characteristically Taiwanese phrases if you select traditional characters. In order to address the complaint here, Google could allow one to select the writing system (Simplified vs. Traditional) independently from the regional variety (Mainland, Taiwan, etc.).
- komali2 3y agoTo clarify, "Standard Chinese" is the English term to describe the official language of the PRC. There is no country called "mainland," nor is there a country called "mainland China," nor is there a language that can be accurately called "Chinese." It's much more clear in Mandarin itself, such as 官話. Note that some might translate this as "Traditional Chinese," separate from the typical meaning, when trying to separate "simplified characters" from "traditional characters." In English it's all a mess. Also, you can write guanhua or beifanghua or "Standard Chinese" in both Simplified and Traditional charactersets. They are almost 1:1. You also used to be able to write Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, and other languages in Traditional Chinese characters. That's why we should be careful to separate Guanhua ("Standard Chinese") from Taiwanese Mandarin and etc. imo using the word "Chinese" in the descriptor just sows further confusion and in fact furthers the political goals of the CPC to cast a political blanket over all things even remotely descriptive as "Chinese," be they language, culture, race, heritage, or nationality.
- DiogenesKynikos 3y agoThe Mainland is a well established concept when talking about China. "Standard Chinese," "Mandarin Chinese," or however you want to call it (there are several terms in Chinese itself that refer to essentially the same thing) is the official language both on the mainland and in Taiwan. They have slightly different variants, but both standards grew out of the same historical movement to standardize Chinese. Both the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China wanted to create a national standard to enable universal communication in the country, and the PRC essentially adopted the standard the ROC had been working on.
- herbst 3y agoIs it just me or is translation in android completely broken as well? In the past I could select a word and translate it with the translate button. Now it most of the time triggers a Google search and adds words I didn't select.
- amf12 3y ago> adds words I didn't select. Because you may have enabled that. I just tried this and it gave me an option to enable the feature to include surrounding text for better context or something. As for translation, I get a tooltip to translate, web search or Wikipedia search
- DeathArrow 3y ago>Google Translate has not been accurately translating into Traditional Chinese (as used in Taiwan) for a while now. A lot of times the translation would sound like how Chinese is used in China instead. Isn't Taiwan a part of China, though? I am not trying to justify Google not caring about Traditional Chinese as used in Taiwan. I am merely commenting as the author's view of China and Taiwan as two different entities while almost all countries don't recognize Taiwan as a separate entity.
- RGBCube 3y ago+300 social credit! And no, Taiwan is not a part of China (China says it is, but that's China...).
- SargeDebian 3y agoWhatever your standpoint on that, the site proceeds to explain there is a specific locale that suggests a Taiwan-specific translation as opposed to one that is commonly used on the mainland, but it does actually result in something that is used in Taiwan.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago> Isn't Taiwan a part of China, though? Given that the Chinese military doesn't control it, the answer it obviously no.
- liendolucas 3y agoOne funny thing that I found not long ago is that you can traverse a long chain of word translations by re-feeding the translated word. You start with a word let's say in italian, get it translated to spanish. Now you grab that word in spanish and translate back it to italian. You do sometimes a get a different word. You do this again and again. There doesn't seem be a one to one correspondence in certain cases. Don't know if this a known issue nor if some else already spot it.
- bjackman 3y agoA related idea: https://www.translationparty.com/ https://www.translationparty.com/ [Un]fortunately, ja-en machine translation is dramatically better than it was when this website was launched, I guess it was more than 10 years ago. It used to devolve into really bizarre stuff.
- taminka 3y agomaybe the word is a homonym in one language, but isn't in the other languages don't have a strict bijective mapping between them
- liendolucas 3y agoBut I do get way more accurate and consistent translations from other sites.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI wish there were tools for diagramming out sentences like this in languages you don't understand. I'm sure it wouldn't help much for understanding the meaning, but it'd be nice to get an exact/terse explanation of its structure. That, or a naive approach that attempts to map everything to mad-libs style sentences. See also; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass
- dkdbejwi383 3y agoThere used to be a website that would automate this process until either the phrase stabilised, or it reached a maximum number of iterations.
- thriftwy 3y agoWhy not roll out your own translation service to translate English to the specific language used on Taiwan? This way you don't have to sit in the waiting room.
- quanloh 3y agoi am not so sure about the list, I found many are spoken pretty much interchangeably in Taiwan sometimes: 便利店 vs 便利商店, 每秒幀數 vs 每秒影格數(I actually heard more of the former from those youtuber), 高清 vs 高畫質(I actually heard more of the former from those youtuber) etc.
- nightfeather 3y agoThat's another thing we currently struggled with: some of them start seeping into our surroundings. And part of the reason come from these translation tools, there are many translated materials (website, documentations, etc) produced using tools that do not correctly handle the difference, and those content creators don't really care about that.
- quanloh 3y agoReally curious how people views "cultural pollution" so differently. There are some words/usage we takes directly from japan and no one complains, for example 一枚入, 定食, do we need to change those back to what we would have said before influenced by Japan? What I mean is, culture/language slowly evolves, they aren't stagnant, as long as the world are progressing, as long as we are interacting with each other, language changes.
- nightfeather 3y agoYup, I know it's more like a preference problem. But this is also how culture works, we can and want to choose what to accept and what to reject, and just don't want to be the same as the ones who keep acting hostile to us. Another thing is, related to the OP mainly focused on, they have tendency to oversimplifying words and merging words that are not related, which would cause problem when we communicate. Take '質量' as mostly used example, which only means mass of matter in zh_TW, but it may also mean quantity and quality in zh_CN, and the list goes on and on. And about those Japanese words, they don't pollute our tools like the ones in OP stated, we have to choose to use them. edit: typo, more words
- tjpnz 3y agoIt makes an absolute mess of Japanese too. Where I work we explicitly suggest people use DeepL instead.
- addandsubtract 3y agoGoogle translate has felt stagnant for the past few years now. I've used Linguee in the past, but Deepl has become my de facto translation tool now, offering much better translations. (and I just noticed that Deepl runs Linguee now)
- catsarebetter 3y agoHasn't LLM technology mostly made google translate obsolete? Are there still use cases for it?
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoBe careful when you don't speak the target language and you run something significant through a machine translation. The results can often surprise you and your audience. I wrote a speech in English, and had Google Translate it to Spanish. This was around 2010. One of the lines was "There is electricity in the air." The translation read, "No hay electricidad en el aire." I speak Spanish well, and upon proofreading, I freaked out that it would negate the sense of the whole sentence, but it can, and it did.
- BasedAnon 3y agoI often need to translate Arabic, and I just use ChatGPT for translation now, it's much better. Google Translate has been very broken for a while now and will often just completely refuse to translate, or only partially translate or translate in ways that are incoherent
- lm28469 3y agoIt doesn't even translate the word "no" from english to slovak properly, it say it's "č" but should be "nie" https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=sk&text=no&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=sk&text=no&op=trans...
- yorwba 3y ago"no" is an abbreviation for "number" and "č" is the correct translation for that interpretation: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C4%8D%2E https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C4%8D%2E (though Wiktionary only has Czech)
- nojs 3y agoChatGPT works a lot better for translating specific terms into traditional Chinese, and seems to understand when asked to give Taiwan variants.
- jacobwilliamroy 3y agoI think there's just a large profit incentive for corporations to treat Taiwan like it's part of China. I found a Leap Frog globe in walmart the other day and it told me Taiwan wasn't a country and was, in fact, just China.
- itsZero 3y agoAuthor here. Surprised to see this website made it on to Hacker News Glad to see some debates on the vocabs listed there: * Yes, it is very IT oriented. * Yes, I have been in some academic environment. (but seriously, 文本 is rarely heard in my life!) * No, it is not supposed to be an exhaustive list of all things wrong nor _the_ correct list. At the end of day, it is a short list of what I'd like to see it changed and thus I tracked it. We may not all agree on the translations, but I think we can agree on 1/55 is a pretty sad score to have. -- Lastly, feel free to fork and run your copy if you'd like a different set of words / translations to be tracked! https://github.com/itszero/hasgooglefixedityet https://github.com/itszero/hasgooglefixedityet Thanks for my 5 mins fame on HN!
- jiggawatts 3y agoGoogle isn’t using the supposedly highly multi-lingual Bard 2 for their translation service. That should tell you how confident they are in their own AI products I only ever use ChatGPT for translation now. GPT 4 especially blows everything else out of the water in quality. I’ve done some insane round-trips through chains of totally unrelated languages and it retained 95% of the meaning. That’s superhuman quality.