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Does Google Have A Secret “Translate” Service?
- Kudos 13y agoConsider also that Google has context when they translate for their stores, but they can only infer context from the content of translations on Google Translate.
- bri3d 13y agoI had the same thought: it's clear when translating a game description that the name of the game is a noun in whichever gender is appropriate for proper names of software in the target language. Has anyone done any more widespread analysis of "auto"-translated Play Store descriptions versus those available through Google's public translate service? It would be interesting to see how much is contextual and how much suggests a different set of rules, training data, or algorithm.
- raverbashing 13y agoI think this is the right answer Of course, you can't feed context in the public tool It's probably the same one, tuned for the specific issues (not translating the name, "fixed" genders and terms/translations for specific words, context clues, etc) If I'm not mistaken Google uses translations as well when matching content on your site to serve AdSense content.
- darkhorn 13y agoExactly, Google Translate is a statistical translation.
- PeterisP 13y agoThis would be a reasonable guess. Statistical machine translation models can be made a lot more accurate than the general models (i.e., Google Translate on the web) if you can pick a single specific domain, and use a focused training text corpus and terminology; and this improvement can be achieved without any improvements to the underlying algorithms.
- lnanek2 13y agoThe Google Play app translation he mentions isn't done automatically. Look at the announcement: > http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/11/app-translation-service-now-available.html http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/11/app-translati... "purchase professional app translations through the Google Play Developer Console" "select a professional translation vendor" That said, translation vendors tend to just translate automatically first and then have a human clean it up.
- mcintyre1994 13y agoI think he was referring to the descriptions in the Play (and Chrome) stores, which are now automatically translated if translations aren't provided by the developer: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/3125566?hl=en https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
- babuskov 13y agoThose translations are rather bad, at least for languages I use. It appears to use the same algorithm as the free translate service. Developers have option to buy professional translation inside Play Store, and some probably do it for mainstream languages. I'm not sure if you can tell if developer has used it (except by judging the quality of translation)
- mcintyre1994 13y agoFrom the link I posted, "There will be a note above the translation explaining that the translation has been done automatically, and an option to return to the default language." - so presumably if that's not present it was professionally translated.
- babuskov 13y agoLooks like I missed that one. Thanks.
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- bitL 13y agoI always assumed Google has two kinds of translations - the online we know from the web, which is fast though simple, and an offline, that is much more realistic but slow. Other companies achieved very good offline translations (often by employing professional translations that translated sentences between languages and building databases for automated translation) and I see no reason why Google wouldn't be able to create/license a similar one.
- ma2rten 13y agoAll machine translation is based on professional sentence-by-sentence translations.
- lkbm 13y agoExcept Google Translate, which is just a statistical analysis of a huge corpus.
- Mvandenbergh 13y agoYes, of texts available in multiple languages. Which were originally translated by humans.
- runn1ng 13y agoThis is wildly inaccurate.
- ma2rten 13y agoThis is only wildly inaccurate, if you include rule based translation, which is based on hand-crafted models. All statistical machine translation, of which Google Translate is one is based on professional translations. As far as I know all published methods rely on aligning them sentence-by-sentence.
- frik 13y agoMaybe both services run on different data centers and the statistical model is trained with other corpus. Google Translate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate Microsoft Bing Translator works very similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Translator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Translator
- jzwinck 13y agoThe article says Yiddish is "spoken mainly by the Jewish ultra-orthodox community that refrains from using computers." Well that's half true: (ultra-)orthodox Jews are a major part of the Yiddish speaking world, but the idea that they do not use computers is ridiculous. I wonder where this idea comes from...you can even Google it to learn that some rabbis advocate for their members to censor their internet access, which implies they do have computers. They even post on YouTube.
- _delirium 13y agoI believe that's kind of a fallback position, that now that they've lost the battle against computers, 2nd-best is to try to figure out what to do with them. At least as of a few years ago there was an active campaign to discourage the use of computers and especially the internet in haredi communities: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/rabbis-rage-against-net-abominations-1838204.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/rabbis-r.... According to that article, the Vizhnitzer Hasidim even threatened to expel any children whose homes had an internet connection at all from attending the community's schools. And there were some high profile stunts where rabbis smashed smartphones and similar. But now it does seem that they're moving towards being okay with computers as long as they don't include unrestricted internet access: http://forward.com/articles/184099/kosher-smart-phone-arrives-as-ultra-orthodox-tech/?p=all http://forward.com/articles/184099/kosher-smart-phone-arrive...
- CPLX 13y agoNot only do Orthodox Jews have computers, they apparently have enough of them to sell me my last 5 laptops and desktops. (source B&H Photo)
- hnriot 13y agothe only web site that has open hours. I find that amazing that half the time I look for something there the web store is closed for some Jewish holiday - of which there are many.
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- Buge 13y agoI wonder if the translation bots could make an app, and repeatedly change its description and translate it.
- franze 13y agosimple explantation: machine learning. the public google translate tool is trained on data from the internet (and google books), and its intended use is for translating stuff that you found online (on the open web) google play store translation are trained on data from ... tada ... google play store (and probably editorial translations), it's intended use is for translating descriptions on the play store. using the play store translation logic on other texts will probably lead to inferior results. not working for google, just my 2 speculative cents
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- franze 13y agohigh quality cross translations only take you as far, reading "crap" on the internet - is a much bigger data-source. and lets be honest, google is damn good in reading crap on the internet. http://bit.ly/1hnKrbA http://bit.ly/1hnKrbA
- shutupalready 13y agoLooking at that piece of Latin->English translation, the word "United States" caught my attention. How did it get there? I tried to narrow it down. This is the minimal phrase that gives "United States": https://translate.google.com/#la/en/Duis%20gravida%20orci%20in%20quam%20tempor https://translate.google.com/#la/en/Duis%20gravida%20orci%20.... Obviously it's an error, but what specifically makes you go from: Duis gravida orci in quam tempor. to: Designers in the film which, unlike in the United States.
- userbinator 13y agoThat's what statistical translation algorithms do - form associations between source and target text. How did "United States" get there? Because it was trained on a Latin/English phrase that contained "United States" in the English and probably something completely different in the Latin version, and the algorithm decided that would be the best match.
- chacham15 13y agoI remember learning in my machine learning class that translation is a solved problem. However, the reason it appears to be bad is because it is computationally expensive. There are different levels of translation, each of which are increasingly more difficult to compute. There is word for word translation. As you can imagine, this is the lowest level, easy to compute, but overall has poor quality. First, word for word translation, then syntax translation, semantic translation, and finally interligual semantic translation. I took that class a while ago, so forgive me if I'm not 100% accurate, but that is generally the issue: the higher level translation you want, the more expensive the computation.
- ithkuil 13y agoWhile it's true that more accurate translation is more computationally expensive, and we do have good knowledge of the structures and algorithms for machine translation, it's far from being a solved problem, mostly because it requires a relevant multilingual corpus for training (see [1]) That's also why translation performance varies greatly depending on which kind of prose you are translating (yes, there are attempts to translate poetry as well, see [2]). There is a huge amount of potential information on the web but it's rarely well curated and the next big problem is how to extract it. [1] See http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/how-google-translate-works-2353594.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fea... [2] http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/poetic-machine-translation.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/poetic-machine-tr...
- crishoj 13y agoThe lack of high-quality bilingual corpora is hardly the primary obstacle to considering automatic translation a solved problem. Even for language pairs for which plenty of "bitext" exists, the current approaches to machine translation still face major challenges with regards to ambiguities, idioms, finely nuances imagery and other semantic subtleties, all of which pose hard, but not insurmountable challenges to an expert human translator.
- philh 13y agoI don't think translation is even a solved problem for a human fluent in both languages. The ideal is to write what the original author would have written, if they were writing fluently in the target language. Sometimes that means they would have written something that doesn't have the same literal meaning. If a pun doesn't work in the target language, a fluent writer would have used a different pun, but how do you know which? Even if you want to preserve literal meaning, an example that comes to mind, but which I can't quickly source: IIRC the original Metroid manual, in Japanese, referred to Samus with a gender-neutral pronoun. In English, you basically can't do that without calling attention to it. 'They' and 'he/she' are unusual enough to read awkwardly; 'it' and 'he' would be incorrect; and 'she' would give away the twist. Whatever you choose, you're losing something, and it's a judgment call as to what.
- brisance 13y agoDuolingo's translation bot seems to do a much better translation job than Google's "public" tool, at least for Spanish.