7 ms·

Much of the Web Is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism

95 points by yorwba 3y ago

charcircuit 3y ago
YouTube the second biggest site [0] has ~14 billion videos [1] and most of them have machine translated subtitles for all of the languages youtube supports. I could see how a niche language could have most of that language's content on the web could be in autotranslated youtube subs. [0] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/ https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/ [1] https://tubestats.org/ https://tubestats.org/
- Adverblessly 3y ago
  Not only does YT machine translate subtitles, it also machine translates video titles to your search language! I recently ran into a video about a cop painting pistols on some teens at a billiard party if you know what I (or YT) mean...
  - Freak_NL 3y ago
    And you cannot disable it. I watch videos in several languages, but titles are translated into English unless I switch to another language (and then they are all in that language), but I can't tell Youtube to just present the titles in their original language. Really annoying and limiting.
    - slily 3y ago
      Multilingual support sucks almost universally, and that is understandable when most of the innovation comes from countries with low rates of bilingualism, but it is becoming increasingly problematic as platforms like YouTube default to translating everything into a single language that takes several clicks to change. How hard would it be to implement a boolean option for "don't serve me translations by default"? Did they forget to add a column for the default language in their video database? It is particularly mind-boggling when some platforms offer a myriad of accessibility settings that cater to a very small percentage of the population, yet fail to account for people who speak more than one language. It is (or at least was at some point) possible to disable translations of YouTube video titles through a browser plugin or userscript, but the fact that no thought was put into making this toggleable in the first place is insane. Am I the only one who would rather have to translate a few things on my own than to see translations by default? I guess ultimately, it's user attention metrics that lead to such decisions. I imagine it will only get worse with LLMs.
      - Freak_NL 3y ago
        The majority of people are proficient in either one language, or that language plus English. We are in a minority not worth catering to if selling eyeballs is the business model, because we are by definition proficient in a language.
bluetomcat 3y ago
As a native Bulgarian speaker and web surfer, I am experiencing this first-hand with most local web content. Apart from the stories on local politics and the occasional crime-related article, most of the other content is poorly-translated text from SEO-driven English sources. It's not just the web, either. Crappy American books that were trendy decades ago are translated and marketed as a cool thing. Local writers and content producers have adopted the same artificial way of writing.
- debesyla 3y ago
  Same in Lithuania, but half of websites are of russian origin. I wish there was a search engine that let me disable all the low-effort machine-translated websites from the results.
  - gog 3y ago
    Same in Croatia with Russian content.
    - vlabakje90 3y ago
      Can you explain? I'm curious to why this is the case. It's more evident to me in the case of Lithuania.
      - gog 3y ago
        Not sure I understand the question. Croatia is a small country and we don't have vast amounts of content in our own language, so when I search I often get bombarded with machine translated content from Russian origin. I suppose it is Russian, since there are images with text written on them that is in cyrillic. If it were Serbian (they also use cyrillic) there would be no need for translation since we basically speak the same language and a lot of Serbian content is in latin alphabet also.
        vlabakje90 3y ago
tiborsaas 3y ago
Yesterday I was looking at a credit card sized multi tool which had a perfect description in Hungarian except one thing, the auto translation picked "emperor" for ruler and not another word which should have meant the measuring thing :)
- kridsdale1 3y ago
  To be fair, a lot of the shit I buy these days from China has equivalent mistakes in “English”.
crystaln 3y ago
The web has gotten so bad in English (and will only get worse), I can’t imagine how bad it must be in languages that only get the worst badly translated.
g-b-r 3y ago
Markup to declare machine-generated content should be quickly standardized and made semi-compulsory (e.g. with strong search engine penalities if you're caught not using it), if we're to prevent the web to become completely useless junk
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pif 3y ago
I hate how automatic translations are treated on the web as if they were respectable translations, provided by professionals! I can read three languages, and I'd like my browser to pick the "main" version of a page if it happens to be in any of those three languages, and only resort to translated ones if necessary. But there is no way to get this behaviour! And I'd like so much for google to serve me Wikipedia pages in Italian or French if the subject concerns Italy or France, and only resort to English as a fallback, but no way, again! If I set my main language to something other than English, I'll always get poorly translated MSDN documentation, and ugly web surfing in general. As such, I'm stuck with poorly translated youtube video titles, and English Wikipedia when searching about a monument in my hometown.
- yorwba 3y ago
  In theory the Accept-Language header should be enough to get the behavior you want, but of course that requires every single server to implement support, so in practice many sites will keep redirecting you to a different version based on IP geolocation. But <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..." href="..."/> tags are pretty common for SEO, so maybe an extension could parse those to check whether you would prefer one of the other versions.
  - pif 3y ago
    > In theory the Accept-Language header should be enough No, it is not enough, because there is no way to tell: "Pick the source in my 3rd language rather than the translation in my 1st language".
    - Hackbraten 3y ago
      I use the Accept-Language per site add-on [1] for this. It allows me to map top-level domains to preferred languages. Most of the time, this has worked well for me on sites which respect the header. For example, `.de` sites tend to be originally written in German, so I map the `*.de` pattern to the German language. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-language-per-site/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-langua...
kordlessagain 3y ago
I just built a translate pipeline for MittaAI: https://github.com/MittaAI/mitta-community/tree/main/cookbooks/translateweb#readme https://github.com/MittaAI/mitta-community/tree/main/cookboo.... The pipelines crawl and translate any publicly available page. The `translate` pipeline uses Gemini, but could be changed to another model for use.
meroes 3y ago
I started reading some smaller China related topics on the English Wikipedia. Every single one felt machine translated. You know, those sentences that are not even close to correct, with only the confidence of an LLM, peppered between perfectly fine English sentences.
- lainga 3y ago
  Conversely, a lot of en Wiki articles on India-related topics have the article-dropping (i.e. no a or the before definite nouns) characteristic of Indian English. Vive (la?) difference, I say
- yorwba 3y ago
  Probably a mix of users of varying English ability adding bits and pieces to the same article. Some using machine translation, some not.
- gs17 3y ago
  Searching for a lot of China-related content online (in English) can be like that. I wanted to know about a specific type of tofu, every result was clearly a poor automatic translation.
collegeburner 3y ago
this is why we should continue standardizing on english as a global language. there are serious costs to language barriers, and even if many countries maintain fluency in native tongues (China, Europe) promoting english fluency has huge economic benefits, in no small part for the developing world.

95 points by yorwba 3y ago

YouTube the second biggest site [0] has ~14 billion videos [1] and most of them have machine translated subtitles for all of the languages youtube supports. I could see how a niche language could have most of that language's content on the web could be in autotranslated youtube subs. [0] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/ https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/ [1] https://tubestats.org/ https://tubestats.org/

Adverblessly 3y ago
Not only does YT machine translate subtitles, it also machine translates video titles to your search language! I recently ran into a video about a cop painting pistols on some teens at a billiard party if you know what I (or YT) mean...
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  And you cannot disable it. I watch videos in several languages, but titles are translated into English unless I switch to another language (and then they are all in that language), but I can't tell Youtube to just present the titles in their original language. Really annoying and limiting.
  - slily 3y ago
    Multilingual support sucks almost universally, and that is understandable when most of the innovation comes from countries with low rates of bilingualism, but it is becoming increasingly problematic as platforms like YouTube default to translating everything into a single language that takes several clicks to change. How hard would it be to implement a boolean option for "don't serve me translations by default"? Did they forget to add a column for the default language in their video database? It is particularly mind-boggling when some platforms offer a myriad of accessibility settings that cater to a very small percentage of the population, yet fail to account for people who speak more than one language. It is (or at least was at some point) possible to disable translations of YouTube video titles through a browser plugin or userscript, but the fact that no thought was put into making this toggleable in the first place is insane. Am I the only one who would rather have to translate a few things on my own than to see translations by default? I guess ultimately, it's user attention metrics that lead to such decisions. I imagine it will only get worse with LLMs.
    - Freak_NL 3y ago
      The majority of people are proficient in either one language, or that language plus English. We are in a minority not worth catering to if selling eyeballs is the business model, because we are by definition proficient in a language.

bluetomcat 3y ago

As a native Bulgarian speaker and web surfer, I am experiencing this first-hand with most local web content. Apart from the stories on local politics and the occasional crime-related article, most of the other content is poorly-translated text from SEO-driven English sources. It's not just the web, either. Crappy American books that were trendy decades ago are translated and marketed as a cool thing. Local writers and content producers have adopted the same artificial way of writing.

debesyla 3y ago
Same in Lithuania, but half of websites are of russian origin. I wish there was a search engine that let me disable all the low-effort machine-translated websites from the results.
- gog 3y ago
  Same in Croatia with Russian content.
  - vlabakje90 3y ago
    Can you explain? I'm curious to why this is the case. It's more evident to me in the case of Lithuania.
    - gog 3y ago
      Not sure I understand the question. Croatia is a small country and we don't have vast amounts of content in our own language, so when I search I often get bombarded with machine translated content from Russian origin. I suppose it is Russian, since there are images with text written on them that is in cyrillic. If it were Serbian (they also use cyrillic) there would be no need for translation since we basically speak the same language and a lot of Serbian content is in latin alphabet also.
      - vlabakje90 3y ago

tiborsaas 3y ago

Yesterday I was looking at a credit card sized multi tool which had a perfect description in Hungarian except one thing, the auto translation picked "emperor" for ruler and not another word which should have meant the measuring thing :)

kridsdale1 3y ago
To be fair, a lot of the shit I buy these days from China has equivalent mistakes in “English”.

crystaln 3y ago

The web has gotten so bad in English (and will only get worse), I can’t imagine how bad it must be in languages that only get the worst badly translated.

g-b-r 3y ago

Markup to declare machine-generated content should be quickly standardized and made semi-compulsory (e.g. with strong search engine penalities if you're caught not using it), if we're to prevent the web to become completely useless junk

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

pif 3y ago

I hate how automatic translations are treated on the web as if they were respectable translations, provided by professionals! I can read three languages, and I'd like my browser to pick the "main" version of a page if it happens to be in any of those three languages, and only resort to translated ones if necessary. But there is no way to get this behaviour! And I'd like so much for google to serve me Wikipedia pages in Italian or French if the subject concerns Italy or France, and only resort to English as a fallback, but no way, again! If I set my main language to something other than English, I'll always get poorly translated MSDN documentation, and ugly web surfing in general. As such, I'm stuck with poorly translated youtube video titles, and English Wikipedia when searching about a monument in my hometown.

yorwba 3y ago
In theory the Accept-Language header should be enough to get the behavior you want, but of course that requires every single server to implement support, so in practice many sites will keep redirecting you to a different version based on IP geolocation. But <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..." href="..."/> tags are pretty common for SEO, so maybe an extension could parse those to check whether you would prefer one of the other versions.
- pif 3y ago
  > In theory the Accept-Language header should be enough No, it is not enough, because there is no way to tell: "Pick the source in my 3rd language rather than the translation in my 1st language".
  - Hackbraten 3y ago
    I use the Accept-Language per site add-on [1] for this. It allows me to map top-level domains to preferred languages. Most of the time, this has worked well for me on sites which respect the header. For example, `.de` sites tend to be originally written in German, so I map the `*.de` pattern to the German language. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-language-per-site/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accept-langua...

kordlessagain 3y ago

I just built a translate pipeline for MittaAI: https://github.com/MittaAI/mitta-community/tree/main/cookbooks/translateweb#readme https://github.com/MittaAI/mitta-community/tree/main/cookboo.... The pipelines crawl and translate any publicly available page. The `translate` pipeline uses Gemini, but could be changed to another model for use.

meroes 3y ago

I started reading some smaller China related topics on the English Wikipedia. Every single one felt machine translated. You know, those sentences that are not even close to correct, with only the confidence of an LLM, peppered between perfectly fine English sentences.

lainga 3y ago
Conversely, a lot of en Wiki articles on India-related topics have the article-dropping (i.e. no a or the before definite nouns) characteristic of Indian English. Vive (la?) difference, I say
yorwba 3y ago
Probably a mix of users of varying English ability adding bits and pieces to the same article. Some using machine translation, some not.
gs17 3y ago
Searching for a lot of China-related content online (in English) can be like that. I wanted to know about a specific type of tofu, every result was clearly a poor automatic translation.

collegeburner 3y ago

this is why we should continue standardizing on english as a global language. there are serious costs to language barriers, and even if many countries maintain fluency in native tongues (China, Europe) promoting english fluency has huge economic benefits, in no small part for the developing world.