The company is using its network to push the limits of translation technology; its free service has become the favored source for millions.
(From The New York Times)
The story "Google's computer might betters translation tool" published March 8, 2010 at 9:01 PM is no longer available on CNET News.
My wife is from Romania and has also lived in Spain and France for a good part of her life. When I try translating things she emails me in Romanian, Spain Spanish or French the translator mostly doesn't work. Generally it doesn't even know how to translate the words or if it can, it just is random words.
I get regular emails from my daughter's school here in Japan. I can usually sort of figure out what they mean from the Google translation, but it's pretty rough and often very funny. If it looks at all important, I have to read what I can and run the Chinese characters that I don't know through excite.co.jp translation or Jim Breen's JDict at Monash.
Yes, Japanese language uses Chinese characters (many people know as kanji), along with two spelling character sets, hiragana and katakana. Chinese language, however, doesn't have special character sets for spelling.
Prior to the 1950s, China, Taiwan, and Japan used nearly the same Chinese characters, but since then there have been simplifications both in Japan and China. Taiwan holds onto the unaltered set.
The translation service may be "state of the art", but that does not change the fact that the state of the art is very poor. Translation is not a matter of "technology" but a matter of fundamental science. To solve translation, you would have to solve all of artificial intelligence - how to represent meaning, how to combine and understand them, and so on. There is a huge gap in our understanding of how language works in the brain, and hence it will take many many decades at least, before something resembling a good human translation is available. But if the service is good enough to be of practical use in some situations, nothing wrong with that.
Agree "state of the art" is not very good. As an example we take English - translate it into Japanese, then translate the Japanese back into English ... the results are not very pretty.
Also, my family hosts students visiting the US to learn English, many of the students quickly find out that word for word translation services do not "pan out". "What does it mean, red herring?" One of male students in the program suffered the wrath of our female Korean student after he described her in an oral presentation as a "stupid girl"!!! The correct translation should have been "silly" ... yikes. We heard about "stupid girl" every night at dinner for 2 weeks!
One more thing, it would seem that the proper "check" would be A > B followed by B > A and if the meaning is not preserved when translated back into the original language, then the translation is flawed. ???
While Google's translation tool is helpful, it's too often quite humourous. You'd think between western languages where there is a 1-1 correspondence quite often that it would do better, but it makes no difference.
I appreciate that they always request free help "contribute to a better translation" but seriously, Google have money to pay.
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Yes, Japanese language uses Chinese characters (many people know as kanji), along with two spelling character sets, hiragana and katakana. Chinese language, however, doesn't have special character sets for spelling.
Prior to the 1950s, China, Taiwan, and Japan used nearly the same Chinese characters, but since then there have been simplifications both in Japan and China. Taiwan holds onto the unaltered set.
Also, my family hosts students visiting the US to learn English, many of the students quickly find out that word for word translation services do not "pan out". "What does it mean, red herring?" One of male students in the program suffered the wrath of our female Korean student after he described her in an oral presentation as a "stupid girl"!!! The correct translation should have been "silly" ... yikes. We heard about "stupid girl" every night at dinner for 2 weeks!
I appreciate that they always request free help "contribute to a better translation" but seriously, Google have money to pay.