4 ms·

It really is incredible how many translated apps/websites talk like a drunken finn, when i set language to finnish. Only the things made by native finns seem to

It really is incredible how many translated apps/websites talk like a drunken finn, when i set language to finnish. Only the things made by native finns seem to have good Finnish on them.

deleted 3y ago
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hyperman1 3y ago
It's the same in Dutch. In the past, Microsoft had very good translations, but even they seem detoriating. Open source is also quite reasonable, except from the latest features that didn't get translated yet. Apart from that, only local software seems to understand the language. There is hope, however. ChatGPT does quite well translating. You can still see the original English words in the Dutch text, but at least it doesn't descend into total gibberish.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  GPT-4 is actually quite good with languages. You can even get it to do some local Dutch dialects. We use it (via the code gpt plugin) for helping us with localization files for apps. We just give it whole chunks of localization files (mozilla fluent) and task it with translating those while preserving the id structure. Aside from minor formatting issues, I've not caught it making any mistakes. I doubt we'll be working with external contractors for localizations again. It's also really good at doing things like synonyms. We used this to improve our icon search by letting it come up with comma separated lists of alternatives for each icon name. Worked really well too. And it can do fictional languages. We did a pirate speak localization a few weeks ago for international pirate day. Just for giggles but it works.
matsemann 3y ago
I think the problem stems from translators being sent a bunch of strings with little context. At least even when we hired professionals it could sometimes be a bit wonky, especially with shorter texts. For instance the word "speaker" can mean both someone that presents, or a loud-speaker playing music ("høgtaler"). If you tell a translator to translate the string "Speakers:" for a heading, they can't know the context. I once saw a conference program bragging about their loud-speakers in my language..

It really is incredible how many translated apps/websites talk like a drunken finn, when i set language to finnish. Only the things made by native finns seem to have good Finnish on them.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hyperman1 3y ago

It's the same in Dutch. In the past, Microsoft had very good translations, but even they seem detoriating. Open source is also quite reasonable, except from the latest features that didn't get translated yet. Apart from that, only local software seems to understand the language. There is hope, however. ChatGPT does quite well translating. You can still see the original English words in the Dutch text, but at least it doesn't descend into total gibberish.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
GPT-4 is actually quite good with languages. You can even get it to do some local Dutch dialects. We use it (via the code gpt plugin) for helping us with localization files for apps. We just give it whole chunks of localization files (mozilla fluent) and task it with translating those while preserving the id structure. Aside from minor formatting issues, I've not caught it making any mistakes. I doubt we'll be working with external contractors for localizations again. It's also really good at doing things like synonyms. We used this to improve our icon search by letting it come up with comma separated lists of alternatives for each icon name. Worked really well too. And it can do fictional languages. We did a pirate speak localization a few weeks ago for international pirate day. Just for giggles but it works.

matsemann 3y ago

I think the problem stems from translators being sent a bunch of strings with little context. At least even when we hired professionals it could sometimes be a bit wonky, especially with shorter texts. For instance the word "speaker" can mean both someone that presents, or a loud-speaker playing music ("høgtaler"). If you tell a translator to translate the string "Speakers:" for a heading, they can't know the context. I once saw a conference program bragging about their loud-speakers in my language..