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That's very common in smaller countries. The government exists to serve its citizens, not the other way around. When you know a significant minority is less tha
by crote 3y ago
That's very common in smaller countries. The government exists to serve its citizens, not the other way around. When you know a significant minority is less than fluent in your somewhat-obscure local language, providing a translation for that minority is almost a no-brainer.
For example: I am a Dutch citizen. Due to the European Union I have the right to live and work in Iceland. If I were to move there, I'd gain the right to vote in local elections (not national ones, gotta be a citizen for that) - without speaking a word of Icelandic. I'd also have to do taxes, renew my driver's license, and all the other government stuff.
Either I and the thousands like me are going to use Google Translate and screw it up, or they'll just have one of the many bilingual workers provide an official translation. It makes a lot of sense to just translate all official government pages, making an exception for this specific page is probably more work than just translating it too.
- Scoundreller 3y agoAlso because Europe, thanks to the frequency of jus sanguine, people like me can be born and raised in Canada but be a citizen of some European country because my parents were born in its predecessor country many decades ago. So I’m eligible to vote (tho I don’t), but minimally speak that language and have spent minimal time there. I’d also assume Google Translate will do better translating from English to $OtherLanguage than Icelandic to $OtherLanguage. So makes sense to put up a translation into English (or other common language) and make sure it’s correct.
- dhosek 3y agoI would tend to guess that the reverse of your assumption about Google Translate is true. The translations from an uncommon language available for training will, by far, outnumber the translations to that language.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoBut the translations from an uncommon language to a different uncommon language will still be far more rare.
- dhosek 3y agoJust guessing, but I imagine that Google Translate probably will, assuming, say, we represent Zapotec to English as f and English to Kannada as g use f ∘ g to infer the translation of Zapotec to Kannada. And saying that, I’m guessing that if the corpus of f⁻¹ is too small, it can probably attempt to infer the gaps from f. But these inferred mappings are probably of lower quality than explicit ones returning us to the original issue. And man, I really wish someone who actually knew would weigh in on this.