|
I just got an issue report for my Midi Library (at github bit it's also here)
It contained the problem, clear steps to reproduce the problem and was very specific.
It was also in chinese.
Google translated it to near perfect English. I had no trouble understanding any of it. It could have been written by an English speaker. Holy socks batman!
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
It's pretty damn good these days - getting to the point where you don't need to learn another language at all!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
|
|
|
|
|
A user sent me this error message, from a language which I can't even recognize, for my article - DICOM Image Viewer[^], and Google Translation could enable me to pinpoint the error.
|
|
|
|
|
|
What I meant was that Google Translate auto-detected the language.
|
|
|
|
|
I know, it can recognise most languages in their native scripts, even telling the difference between Arabic, Persian and Urdu.
|
|
|
|
|
Wow. Then it should also be able to differentiate between Sanskrit, Hindi and Marathi, which use the same script (Devanagari script).
|
|
|
|
|
It works the same way it can tell English, Spanish, and German apart even though we all use the same alphabet. Only one language has all the input words being in the dictionary.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
|
|
|
|
|
In my experience it works well to and from English. But not as well between two other languages.
I've got the impression that the translation goes via English.
For certain cases, especially animals and plants, I find that using Wikipedia Translation is superior.
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Never stop dreaming - Freddie Kruger
|
|
|
|
|
Fair enough. I've always translated to English. 
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
Last Christmas, as a quiz round, I used Google Translate to take lines from Christmas songs, translate them into Chinese then back again and asked the quizzers to guess the song.
Such gems as
"Oh, what's the fun of cycling? A horse drives a sled."
which was originally ...
"Oh, what fun it is to ride In a one horse open sleigh"
|
|
|
|
|
My husband is an interpreter and translator for Mixtec, a language spoken by certain indigenous people from Mexico. He often has to translate government documents to Mixtec, which is not a "western language" in the linguistic sense of it despite being from the western hemisphere.
"The town elder called 'county commissioner' must..."
And that's one of the easier ones. It's just silly. The way you have to refer to government officials is "town elders"
And furthermore, the language is really verb heavy and noun sparse. For example, they do not have a word for a duffle bag vs a backpack vs a purse. It's all in how you carry something that determines what it is.
Also they have pronouns for fruit and round things, and for some reason dishwashing detergent is a "round thing"
Google does not have a mixtec translator. My husband is one of a handful of non-native speakers in the entire world so it's not likely to have one soon either, but if it did I would totally try Mixtec and back
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
 Interesting post.
Dishwashing detergent is a round thing because of Tide pods. 
|
|
|
|
|
I asked my husband about it. He says there is a plant from where they come from they would grind up and use as soap, and the little plant pods are round. It carried from there. Liquid detergent however, is considered a liquid.
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
yep, and it is getting better with slang terms and phrases too that don't translate well.
Also, my grandfather's birth certificate is entirely in Russian. I was able to translate it to English with Google Translate and another site that had the Russian alphabet that I could copy from.
very cool indeed.
|
|
|
|
|
The words, I understand them well, but what are they trying to tell me?
Do you really believe that you have to pass a CensusDragon as a parameter to the constructor of the MidiProofReader object to read a MIDI port?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
|
|
|
|
|
I am now getting Chinese telemarketers (I guess) that only speak Chinese.
Instead of border wars, it's boiler room wars, but the Chinese are still learning how the game works.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
|
|
|
|
|
I get spam calls in Chinese on my California-based mobile. Apparently, most of these try to convince people to wire funds to China because a relative is in jail and needs legal help.
|
|
|
|
|
Yeah. No more Chinese princesses.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
|
|
|
|
|
Even though Google Translate may be good at constructing grammatically correct phrases in English,
translating to other languages than English is clearly inferior.
Translating from one non-English language to another non-English language may be just crazy. It seems to translate from the source language, possibly making a lot of misunderstandings, to English, and then, possibly running into ambiguities in the English language, translating the it from there to the destination language.
To illustrate by a classic example (this one has been corrected now): Norwegian and Swedish are very close languages; we usually understand each other without any 'translation'. But earlier, Norwegian 'postoppkrav' was translated to Swedish 'TORSK', which makes no sense at all. It went this way: 'postoppkrav' is Norwegian for 'Charge on delivery', so it was translated to English 'COD'. Then this was interpreted, not as the abbreviation, but referring to codfish, which in Swedish is 'torsk'. Since the English input was in uppercase, the Swedish translation was uppercased, too.
I receive a lot of spam mail, lots of it from Asian or East European sources, that has made a clumsy attempt to market themselves by translating to Norwegian. Most of the subject lines (I rarely go beyond that) make no sense at all in Norwegian, unless I try to back-translate it to English. Then it suddenly makes sense, when I consider all the alternate meanings of the English words!
When I need to access a text in a language I do not master, I have given up translating it to Norwegian - it goes to English, and usually makes sense. Nevertheless, I often make a final check asking for the Norwegian version, and get something that may be total gibberish. At least in part.
So you English (only) speakers: Continue non-learning other languages, if that is your preference. But if you write something aimed at non-native English speakers, please do not use Google Translate to send away something in a language you do not master! If you cannot afford to have it properly translated (or at least quality checked) by someone who fully masters the target language, rather send your text in English, untranslated!
|
|
|
|
|
It's standard that translation should be done by someone who is as good as a native speaker in the target language. I read Haruki Murikami, but despite the fact that he spent time at US universities, his work is translated from Japanese to English by others.
|
|
|
|
|
|
But it still can't translate QA into something that actually makes sense 
|
|
|
|
|
Much less the code! 
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
Quote: Much less the codez!
FTFY
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
