Google Translate Is Actually Terrible
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 22 авг 2024
- Check out iFixit’s options for laptop repairs, including replacement batteries and SSDs, at ifix.gd/Techqu...
Google Translate has come a long way but still has significant limitations. Why is this, and how could Google fix it?
Leave a reply with your requests for future episodes.
► GET MERCH: lttstore.com
► GET EXCLUSIVE CONTENT ON FLOATPLANE: lmg.gg/lttfloa...
► SPONSORS, AFFILIATES, AND PARTNERS: lmg.gg/partners
FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE
---------------------------------------------------
Twitter: / linustech
Facebook: / linustech
Instagram: / linustech
TikTok: / linustech
Twitch: / linustech
I live in Wales and a few years ago the local council erected a new bilingual (English/Welsh) road sign. The English said "No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only" but the Welsh read as "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated."
I don't think Google Translate would have done any worse. 😆
😢
That's hilarious! I guess bilingual / multilingual people need to put their out of office autoreply in every language they speak.
they thought nobody can read welsh anyway
@@barrettdecutler8979 if you Google 'swansea road sign BBC' there was a news article about it.
Not to mention you literally can't translate between languages that have different amount of functions, at least without enough context. There is no such thing as formal and informal distinction in some languages, some have missing genders, some have missing tenses, so without context, you can't translate it correctly.
This whole thing made me think about ancient Koine Greek, they have 9 different words for our one word for love. You have a specific Greek word for family love, another for friendship love, and so on. I'm sure other languages have similar situations with certain words.
Tbf that can also be REALLY useful. AI can't figure out the German Du/Sie distinction (informal/formal 2nd person singular) to save it's life... I mean code, which makes it WAY harder for scammers of all types (who usually only speak English) to create something that sounds even vaguely natural.
Translate this: Weow
Neighborhood cat: That's Australian for Meow
G-translate: Invalid language
@@dece870717 At least in english to love and to like are two different words, in french there isn't a verb that means to like.
@@jeremie_avec_ie Speaking of french, I'm Polish, there's a word you'd use for when someone is about to eat their meal, we say smacznego, the best way I understand to translate it to someone is to tell them it's like saying bon appetit, lol
5:00 As a french guy, this is so true. Tho there aren't many people using that term, but it's literally « It's not sorcery »
oh ! i'm not the only french guy here !
@@ferreolduboiscoli Always has been!
i guess translating English to French is Rocket Sorcery after all
@@ferreolduboiscoli I'm french as well. Actually it's something we're trying to hide here that the whole Linus Media Group audience is french. Play along.
Funny enough, although German and French are much more different than German and English, it's "Es ist kein Hexenwerk" (it's not witchcraft) here. But it is also a bit outdated
I remember the state of Google translate from 2016 too well. When i wanted to translate "vermissen" (German for "to miss (someone)" into Spanish, it gave me "señorita" lol
I just tried it with German to Czech and Polish, it actually still does it!
Your missing closing bracket triggers me
@@Ubeogesh here it is ) 😁
There was a time in Germany where a man from Iraq asked "Will this train split?" Into Google Translate. It returned "This train should soon explode" ("Dieser Zug sollte bald explodieren"), leading to the trains being searched, the poor guy being arrested and to over 16 hours of delay.
💥
O wow, fortunately the Google Translate failures I have experienced so far have been a lot more innocent.
Example: I had recently been in France with my boyfriend. He wanted to ask the waiter in a restaurant whether he could still change the starter because he changed his mind. He typed "Ist es möglich, die Vorspeise zu ändern?" ("Is it possible to change the starter?" in German) into Google Translate while I was in the bathroom. Luckily I have decent knowledge of French and he showed it to me before telling the waiter.
The output was "Est-il possible de changer le démarreur?" Now yes, démarreur is a kind of starter... It's the starter motor of a combustion engine 😂😂😂.
PS: In German, the word for the food is "Vorspeise" and the starter motor is "Anlasser". So it should be completely unabiguous. So my guess is Google still translates via English. To test this hypothesis, I translated the same sentence from German to Latin, where there is no word for a starter motor. Sure enough, the translation was "Licetne mutare starter?"
It's not just about a slang, Google translate is still confused with negatives of my language even today. Sentences with meaning similar to "you can't do this" GT quite often translate as "you can do this" (it's just an example for better imagination, not literally this sentence). Which immediately makes the translation not "good", but "the worst possible".
Sometimes Google translate translate to break up my gf hahaha I used it a lot to talk my gf.... I seriously need to learn my own language
Exactly, i have seen this multiple times. It translate to something that is completely the opposite meaning of what is actually said.
Well to be fair GT wasn't wrong on your example, if you cannot do this then you definitely can do that LOL
@@squalltheonly Geez, "this" vs "that" was my mistake when I was writing it. Fixed.
The point is about "can't" vs "can".
yay to double negatives
I found Google Translate to be really useful when i was in Germany last year. Just point my phone at a sign and get a 'good enough' translation instantly
And that's exactly the type of place that Google translate excels. Short information signs, or very simple directions. Things that you don't have to deal with nuance for.
true true and true
(all 3 comments)
Literally any German will tell you to use DeepL on anything that isn't one specific word.
English and German are both germanic languages, it isn't that difficult to translate between them
Honestly this is really interesting to hear about. I’m bilingual and have studied several other languages before, and it’s pretty easy to know when someone used google translate since it’s so funny. That being said, google translate is an invaluable tool in lots of cases, and insane to me that it’s free to use.
As a developer, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to create something like this, let alone improve it.
Amazing video, really loved it
Yeah, it's amazing for a free tool that so many people can access, and it's super fast too.
Why do you think it's nightmare as developer to improve on this ?
when trying to translate "i kid you not" to Hebrew Google translates it to "I am a child you are not.. it's SO bad.
i mean... not wrong.
To be fair to Google translate that phrase is a really tricky one because like what the dude is saying in this video? Idioms slang terms and similar need to be manually edited to not be translated using the literal definitions of the words because they often don't come anywhere near the literal definitions of the words. And for how many idioms there are in all the different languages, That alone is completely unreasonable. Let's just completely ignore slang terminology and similar
Yes it is, in this context kid is from kidding, not a child, so the correct meaning is "I am not joking" which can be accurately translated to Hebrew @@satgurs
Chat GPT has oddly been the best Hebrew to English translation. But I think it has been trained on a lot of ancient Hebrew texts and books which almost sounds like Old English or Shakespearean 😅 to a Hebrew speaker. But that being said זו עדיין טכנולוגיה ממש טובה
As not enlish native speaker, I did not understand that thing until I've watched some video of people joking and using it, this is where it dawned on me, same with other stuff
“It’s not rocket surgery” not an Idiom but a Malaphor. Thank you, back to the show.
Too late to change that. It's just water under the fridge now.
Rocket surgery? Isn't it Rocket science?
@@guillermojperea6355 That's the joke: you blend two idioms
@@random_n where does water under the fridge come from?
@@theagentofchaos1600 Thawed frozen pizza.
Google also can't differentiate between things like formal function vs casual function. The word "you" in Dutch has 2 translations for formal and casual use. Google always chooses the formal use
It absolutely can, based on the context. For example, if you translate "you are beautiful" into French, it'll output "tu es belle". But for "you are beautiful, dear sir", the output will be "vous êtes beau, cher monsieur". And with ChatGPT you can just say, "use formal register".
actually! italian -> japanese is still done like italian -> english -> japanese. and let me tell you... IT SUCKS
Google Translate no longer uses English as the middle language. It has its own, abstract, mathematics-based middle language when it can't directly pair two languages together. Tho this intermediary language might well be skewed by English representations because it's mostly trained on English-based dataset.
@@Liam3072 did my usual test of "не учи учёного" (lit. don't (dare to) teach the scientist) into any language that has no business having direct pair with Russian (e.g. Malay) and as usual it turned idiom into English one about teaching grandmother to suck eggs in target language.
So yeah, for external black box observer it totally still uses English as intermediate language.
@@Liam3072 If that is the case, then that "abstract language" might as well be English. Currently if I enter this Chinese text "地面 地板" ("ground" as in "surface of the earth", and "floor", separated by a space) and set it to translate to Japanese, it returns 地上階, the Japanese word for "ground floor" (first floor in US English and 一樓 in Chinese).
@@Liam3072 mh.. could be
@@VieShaphielsounds like it worked fine then
If Google Translate ends up nailing it every time, we will no longer have the joy of scripts run through 10 layers of languages and back into English.
💀 that username
Just use a worse translation machine lol
@@realcartoongirl Yup, it's an string of text that identifies this user, "realcartoongirl".
@@Echinacae True, but will it have the same charm? :p
@@BrownFoxWarrior if it’s bad enough, I sure think so?
I’m an english speaker who is learning spanish.
I once had a six month relationship using Google Translate with someone who spoke only spanish. Very difficult and slow in the beginning but we both learned a lot about the limitations of the app. We learned to quickly identify and remedy incorrect translations.
Regular practice at translating various expressions with the app in our spare time was extremely helpful.
I think a lot of people really underestimate the value of using Google translate as a learning tool. You can very quickly put something in to see what it says, then either commit that to memory or try to see why it's wrong. Putting I the same word or symbol with different contexts can teach you a lot.
i was on the other side. as a native spanish speaker, most of what i've learned came from directly translating all i found with translators. Back in the day, our videogames rarely came with spanish, so there was a need. took me a bit to notice the inaccuracies present in said translations.
some 10 or so years, i'm sitting here with an almost native grasp of english
And that is still the best case scenario for language pairing 😂
@@barrettdecutler8979 👍
@@itsdokko2990 👍
We've come a long way since Altavista's Babelfish to be fair
there is an italian youtube channel that became famous making google translate parody songs. took the original English lyrics, put them trough google translate and then sang them with the music base and silly images. peak comedy for teen me.
Twisted translation is itallian?
@@gorkskoal9315 i was talking about scottecs
Read an interesting Android Authority article about using GPT-4o and its photo upload feature on their trip to Vietnam. The author had a significantly better translation experience with ChatGPT than Google Translate.
surprised they made a video about translation programs in 2024 and didn't mention LLMs once
@@willy_gooseling69 yeah I've found LLMs are super useful in providing additional context too
@@willy_gooseling69Yeah. They touched on neural networks but that was it. LLMs can understand different alphabets and harder concepts like context, culture, and even idioms.
The article I referenced had an example of a restaurant menu written in Vietnamese. Google Translate could read the alphabet but didn't understand Vietnamese cuisine at all, leading to direct translations like "Chemical Beans" and "Lemon Salt" instead of "Pennywort with Beans" and "Salted Lemonade" (which GPT-4o got right and could even provide more details on request)
@@clebbington GPT4o is an improvement but the technology behind it is not that different (Google Translate is still transformer-based just like LLMs). It's just a better model. And still fails a lot.
Surprised i had to scroll down so far for this. In terms of translation Gpt4o is as big of a jump forwards from the current google translate as google translate is from babelfish. Its completely and utterly obsolete. Referencing studies about google translates accuracy is completely worthless in qualifying current translation technology
I have a story that demonstrates why one shouldn't rely on machine translation for something that is actually serious. in mid-late 2000s Russian Institute of Protein Research translated their website using a machine translation tool and proudly displayed "SQUIRELL INSTITUTE" at the very top of the English version of the website. In Russian "Belka" is both nominative singular for "squirrel" and genitive singular for "protein". The algorithm just couldn't see the difference, and it took quite a while for people to notice.
On a related topic, back in late 2016 my professor speculated that in roughly 5-7 years from then machine translation should improve drastically as then obscure thing, LLMs, would boom. We then proceeded to dip our toes into what neural networks and LLMs are, despite it not really being on the curriculum. They didn't change the field as much as she predicted, but dang, that time window was spot on. Too bad I couldn't continue studies in that particular field, would've been wild to basically be an actual expert on LLMs two years ago.
Hey, I now know why Smurfs were described as three apples high. I always thought of it literally, not just generic "they are small".
Translator here. Everyone and their cousin has been telling me "You will be out of work and computers will do translations more accurately and efficiently" since Google Translate came to the scene, to which I have always replied "One day they will, but I won't be around to see that day". This is still true. My mother tongue is the 13th most spoken language in the world and doesn't belong to any language family (it has its own). Its word order is completely different, it's somewhat more indirect compared to English and it's genderless. That being said, it's extremely mathematical and there are very few exceptions to rules, most of which are for loanwords anyway. Despite that, machine translation accuracy is... extremely questionable. Especially since I focus on translating works of art like movies, series and documentaries.
I was taking a flight several years ago. It was on a small plane where you had to drop your bag at the end of the jetway where they would take it and put it in the cargo hold, then they'd give it back to you at the end of the flight. You'd get a small tag that you had to attach to your handle.
There was a Chinese couple a few seats away from me in the boarding area. The gate agent tried to explain it to them, but they clearly did not speak English.
I pulled out my phone, typed it up in English, translated it to Chinese, and got there attention. I showed them my phone, they read it, and it was good enough that they understood. It probably sucked as a translation, but it got the point across.
Google translate famously was the first to do a half decent job at arabic and chinese
Google Translate isn't very good if you're trying to translate languages you don't know. But if you're translating between a language you know fluently and a language you're learning and are decent at, it's very useful. You just need to know how to use it and not just blindly depend on it
So it only works if you already know the answer? It feels like a lot of tech lately is like that.
@@billy101456 It works if you have a vague idea of what the answer is but arent quite sure if youre right. Google translate usually gets close enough that you can tell whether or not youre on the right track or if the meaning is completely different from what you thought it was. Theres obviously exceptions where google translate screws up so bad that the translated sentence means something entirely different, but even with those flaws its still pretty useful during the beginning stages of learning a language imo. Just dont rely on it.
@@billy101456 No.. If you don't know the language at all it's obviously better than nothing. But like with anything, if you know how to use the tool it will give a much better result. I use it a lot for help with grammar and vocabulary. You can't just put a whole book in and expect it to be translated perfectly. Sometimes you need to break down sentences and expressions in ways where it can't mix things up, try phrasing things in different ways, reverse the languages and see if the translation changes. If you know multiple languages you can cross-check with those, and know which languages translates better to a certain other language. And if you want to ensure a good result you of course need to understand what it's saying in the end. I very very often can't make the sentences that I want on my own because I don't know the grammar or vocabulary or an expression or whatever, so I enter stuff in one language until I see something that makes sense in the other language.
It's not just going to give you the answer as if it's a professional human translator, it's a tool and if you know how to work it you can get very good results, but you at least need to be somewhat able to recognize what you're looking for in the end
In both case, it still not very good. The difference is you know what part not good.😂
Exactly Its tool !
Its not translating for us
this also apply to other thing than tranalators ... recwntly AI
People think it can do a jod but no its a tool you still need to be there to do the work (most complicated things)
ChatGPT: "hold me beer"
@@Morimea At least when you are dealing with very structed definitions and concepts the little room to create can actually be very accurate, in some cases it can try to imitate some unique tone but by definition this is outside of the norm aka is less likely to take it into account
@@Morimea I fed your comment to ChatGPT, he responded with this 😆:
Wow, it's fascinating to see such insightful critique of LLM translators. Your mastery of English grammar, as evident in "same bad as google," truly sets a high standard for all of us. It's clear that your deep understanding of language makes you an authority on this topic.
As for LLMs like ChatGPT, you're absolutely right. They definitely can't handle the nuanced and context-rich text like, say, a RUclips comment. It's not like they've been trained on vast amounts of text data or anything. And breaking into "nonsense-hallucination"? Sounds like a wild ride! Perhaps they just need to take a few notes from your flawlessly constructed sentences.
But hey, keep fighting the good fight against those pesky advanced algorithms with your impeccable linguistic prowess. We're all learning from your shining example!
ChatGPT is Irish?
@@feynstein1004 ye cuz they speak English wrong no cap fr fr
I started to use gpt-4o for translations, it handles everything that google can't, even explaining many word jokes and matching the style, and the only translator that can handle casual japanese, where all other translators just output garbage - especially when you can provide additional contex the text itself is lacking.
That's a lot of french today, techquiche
What I've noticed as a german learning japanese is that the issue of first translating to english and then to whatever your native language is, is still there. English has a lot of words with completely different meanings depending on the context e.x. "秋" meaning fall (the season) is translated to fall (the verb) in german which is espescially enoying since google translate doesnt show any alternative translation as it does when translating to english so I was kinda forced to switch to an analog japanese-german dictionary
As a english to portuguese translator, I think this solution of having a person to just check and edit a machine translation to be more heavy-lifting than to have the same person translating everything from the ground up.
Revising/checking other people's work (in this case, the machine's work) is way more time consuming and the work doesn't flow as well.
I'd say revising an excellent professional translation for the usual mistake goes pretty fast. But MTPE is another beast. I'd say at best you can save 20% of the time, but the quality will almost always suffer, with the final result feeling "technically correct but not very natural". It's easy to take a machine translation and e.g. correct a mistranslation such as a an idiom being translated literally, but it's exceedingly difficult to take a machine translation and correct the overall style.
@@Liam3072 yes that's pretty much it. When you put 'flair' into just some parts of a machine text, it becomes very unnatural.
That happens a lot in games nowadays, when some NPC dialogues are kept as robotic as the machine can do while main characters are translated by human hands.
There's an entire service scheduling website in Chile that begs to differ.
Well, Spanish does have the highest accuracy rate of any language, to be fair.
6:22 Its hilarious you use this as an example. Because there are differences between British english, and American English.
For example, traditionally, saying "What's up?" In British english is usually asking if there is anything wrong. And "You alright?" is mostly used as a greeting. In American english, this is flipped on its head.
Due to the internet the line isnt so clear these days and meaning now is mostly conveyed through tone and context, but still the example stands.
A cool thing about Bulgarian(probably other languages, too but I cant speak on them) is that the order of the sentence doesnt need to be one way or another. It can go tens of different ways. For example the ohrase "My teacher was hit by a bus yesterday." Translates to "Моята учителка беше ударена от бус вчера" but the sentence can be ordered like this for example "Бе ударена учителката ми от бус вчера" which in English it would be "Was hit teacher my by a bus yesterday" You can order it any way as long as its clear that YOUR teacher was hit by a bus yesterday. Kinda like no wrong answers type of thing, which I think is cool
I use it as an EMT with the occasional Bulgarian or Polish truck driver. It's overall pretty solid for medical questions... Though it can lead to some awkward misunderstandings as well. One time the answer written back to me was "no, I don't want to sleep with you" 😅
Even if that's not what you were asking, at least you knew where you stood. Thanks, Google Translate. 👍
It stopped accepting training feedback
I can say this much about Google Translate. Here's a little story I like to tell:
I am a psychiatric nurse in an emergency room in southern Oregon. We see a lot of foreigners from Southern countries brought in to work our let's call them "Herbal Farms". We had this one by 21 year old from Chile. I worked with several people that spoke Spanish however none of the people I worked with could really understand her. They said if something to do with your dialect. Even our tablet on wheels that we roll into rooms that we use a translation service for those translators could not understand her either. She ended up staying for 3 days and she was my patient for those 3 days. I was able to actually communicate with her via using Google Translate. What it was is she would look at my phone and we would use Google Translate in that way and she was able to understand what we were saying and then put it into her phone and let us read what it says and this is my story on how I love Google Translate it helps me get this most likely abducted and drugged patient back to her home country
That thumbnail convinces me now more than ever that James is the real Puppet Master at LMG, and he's the one that calls the shots. Its at his will whether you live or die. That look tells me that he was poised to overthrow linus and become the new head of the company before Yvonne sensed the danger and wanted to get a middleman between him and Linus, so she convinced Linus that they (as company shareholders and owners) should hire a CEO to actually be in charge of the company and emplyees including Linus (now the CVO and main media personality) and Yvonne (i think Chief Financial officer or something related to money? I dunno).
Now James is having to plot a slow game of gaining the trust of a third party not seen in the content they make which makes it more difficult to get close to Tarrin (the CEO, not Tarrin the genius with a literally 3 separate keyboards for shortcuts in video editing software) and find things to exploit about him.
The day that James gets what he wants and is the leader of LMG is coming, we just need to he patient. I believe in James Media Group.
DeepL is more accurate than Google Translate
I find that not to be the case in the more widely used languages
I've tried both and for Japanese I feel that Google Translates paints a much clearer picture
I wanted to say that lol.
@@jatoxosecond this for Japanese
Nope
At least Google Translate is better than Microsoft Translate.
Edit: I meant for me.
Thats a thing???
There is Microsoft Translate?
And works in a partical sense and is free... Like yes you have to check if it's right but even the most talented human translators and multi lingual folk make mistakes...
I beg to differ
Came to say this lol wow it was bad when i tried to use it in Japan
By the way, this is an excellent video. The explanations in layman's terms are top notch, the current challenges and uncertainties regarding the future are completely correct. You got your facts exactly right and you explained it better than I could have, all this in barely 7 minutes. As a translator, it's exceedingly refreshing to see this topic being treated this well by a non-specialist media. Kudos to Jessica Pigeau who did an amazing work here. This is the kind of journalism I wish I saw more often on the Internet.
to your last point: I really like the difference between the french and the canadian french translations of Disney songs.
They're different localisations with different cultural context and it's one of the rare examples where the result is actually in the same language.
What you described is localisation instead of translation. Translation is just going by what it says, localisation is making it make sense and match the tone of the original.
4:54 "French people don't use rocket science or brains(urgery as benchmarks for difficulty)"
i remember years ago, google would translate "milkshake" into "bouncing boobs" when translating from english to japaneese.
I mean... id consider this a good translation
Related to the portion about idioms and metaphors, with context and subtlety needing to be included for a good translation... Tom Scott did a great video about 6 months ago, shortly before he retired from RUclips about why dubbing doesn't match subtitles. It has a good explanation of discussion about how a direct word translation often isn't the correct translation to get the feeling of a phrase. Or when an idiom can be translated over, but needs different phrasing in the target language. That video has 6 different dubs and human translations to compare the differences. I definitely recommend taking a look there for anyone wanting to go a bit further. He's also got a 9 year old video about how terrible machine translations are as well, if you want to look at it from nearly a decade ago, it hasn't really changed much because of the complexity.
I did a Google Translate from Italian to English. The text included a list of countries, one of which was Macedonia (now known as North Macedonia). It translated that country to "Fruit Salad".
Just like Turkey is both a food item and the former name of a country (now Türkiye) in English, Macedonia is both a food item and the former name of a country in Italian.
I have seen “Roasted poultry breast with rice and vegetable sky”
As a Finnish person, I can say that Google Translate has gotten better in a decade or so that I've used it - it was basically unusable in early 2010s - but it still struggles a lot with some quirks of our language, e.g. English -> Finnish it still sometimes translates words into their base form instead of conjugating them based on what possessive pronoun/noun was used and with Finnish -> English it sometimes translates a word correctly and sometimes leaves it untranslated. Also, our language's gender neutral pronouns still sometimes showcase the sexism that's accidentally built into Google Translate 😅
i know a finnish guy who told me that in the early 2010s google translated "every litter bit hurts" to "jokainen pentue pala satuttaa" which was incorrect
I am currently translating an old legal document (dealing with a family member decades ago) from a language I am fluent in, to English, which I am also fluent in. The legalese translated in Google translate is frustrating, and it is taking a long time to figure some sentences out, as in making them sound as “legal” as I am able. (I am not well versed in legalese for either language, so that’s a problem, too.) For everyday use, Google translate is good. For legalese, not so much. 😢
If you use LLMs designed SPECIFICLY for translation and constantly update it it would work for slang
An interesting example of a special phrase that is broken for many smaller languages in Google translate (and Microsoft translator) is "estate tax"; e.g., in Danish it is translated as "ejendomsskat" which corresponds to "real estate tax". A native speaker may not catch that error.
I miss the Google Translate bug (no pun intended) where it would translate basically every uncommon Kanji as "moth" in Japanese to English
Why thumbnail says "Pork"
🤦🏻♂️
🤦♂️
🤦🏽♂️
🤦🏼
🤦♀
I wrote some letters with info that was being sent out to participants. I had it written in Norwegian, but wanted to give one example in english to one of them. Tried putting it into google translate and figured I'd let it do the rut work and I'd finish it, but it was so insanely wrong. Put it into ChatGPT and asked it to keep my style of writing and it was absolutely insane how accurate it was. I only needed to do some very minor corrections
I recently used GPT 3.5 for translating my software from English to Dutch. I had to teach it a few nuances (e.g., how to write “homepage”), but nothing cultural needed addressing. Using GPT, I quickly translated about 350 sentences with about a 95% accuracy. It even considered Markdown and HTML.
You always have to wait for the whole sentence.
Like that german song shows
Du (you)
Du hast (you have)
Du hasst mich (you hate me)
Du hast mich gefragt (you asked me)
As a professional translator, thanks for this. It's actually well explained and highlights the biggest flaws of machine translation.
As a side note: companies are the ones trying to push MT, not translators themselves, basically all of the linguists I know despise the use of automation for professional purposes :/
Between Alphabet's Goggle Translate & Microsoft's Bing Translator, both have different hits/misses in translating things in both directions.
coogle confusion translate haha
"Translated by Google"
bro cracked the code
this man right here
this man knows something we don't
But what if the AGI hates Byron but loves Yeats so the translations of Lord Byron poetry sucks on purpose?
This is a really good explanation of why translation is so hard. You can communicate on a basic level at this point with google translate but you are probably going to be missing a lot if you try and hold an actual conversation with someone using it.
If you want better translations from Google Translate and DeepL, don’t input single words of phrases, as meaning is dependent on context in many languages. Give bigger inputs that use the words and phrases in the way you intend to use them.
don't worry, Bing Translator is worse
who else is acceptably good?
@@thisemptyworm4677 DeepL maybe.
@@thisemptyworm4677 DeepL
@@thisemptyworm4677 and ChatGPT
Bing have gpt-4 integrated now
My Swedish relatives came to the US on vacation once. They drove down the East Coast from NYC and then made their way into Texas, stopping for food all along the way. And because they'd put "drinking straw" into Google Translate with no way to verify its output was accurate, they wound up confusing the hell out of servers across the country by asking for a "sucking pipe." Cracks me up to this day.
why didn't they just say "straw"? don't most swedes know english?
@@gamecubeplayer It varies quite a bit. It didn't used to be considered a vital skill, so older people are less likely to know any English at all. I'm not sure if it's actually mandatory or just really popular, but either way, most young Swedes have taken some English at school and can usually speak it fairly well. But any given language is made of tens of thousands of words and you can't learn them all in classes, so there will be gaps.
My relatives didn't know they were called "straws" because it had never come up, so they just Googled it. This was in the late 2000s; Google has since fixed this, but it used to translate the Swedish word, "sugrör," very, very literally into "sucking pipe." Somebody probably had to go in there manually and get Translate to use that specific term correctly.
Languages often have weirdly specific differences in meaning like that. Another good example being the French "pomme de terre," which literally translates to "apple of the earth." An English speaker would call the same object "potato." The English "pineapple" is a portmanteau of "pinecone + apple," and I'm sure other languages find that hilarious. Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns, so any time you want to refer to someone as "he" or "she," you'll end up saying the equivalent of "it who is male" or "it who is female." Languages are insanely complicated and don't always have features that match up 1:1, which is why machine translation is so imperfect. And hilarious. Ehehehehe. Sucking pipe.
@@crystalsoulslayeri know a finnish guy who told me that google translated "every litter bit hurts" to "jokainen pentue pala satuttaa" which used the incorrect meaning of the word "litter"
i found that gpt is better translater than google tr
Ah slang! An Argentine friend visiting us in the U.S. desert Southwest innocently used a slang phrase that to her meant "Could I hitch a ride with you?" Yet in the Spanish spoken por aquí, is an invitation to ... um, certain kinky activities.
I've been a language teacher and I'm currently getting my Master's degree in linguistics and none of my students ever believed me when I tried to tell them this, thank you so much for this video!!!!
I was recently trying to assist myself with google translate to translate some work related text.
The problem being: my elementary french got most of the stuff, but I got precisely enough so that I was aware that like half of the words I needed translating gave the wrong result. I even used French->English instead of French->Dutch, as I had experienced before how the translator works.
I hoped this'd give an answer as to why translator is about as good as someone that's had ~100 hours of french, but I still don't understand why it's not way farther, seeing as to what other things tech can do.
Living in Korea for the past decade, I started with Google Translate with lackluster results and while it has improved significantly, I have been using Papago instead for years now. Papago being made by Naver a domestic company. Papago has become more than sufficient for my needs. While I have learned some Korean, the language is absurdly difficult at least, for me--we can't all be Dave.
As a translator with a decade of experience I concur. The more artistic and nuanced the harder and more rewarding the work. I have noticed that Gen AI is better at many translation tasks traditional software is not, including older dialects of my native language. It is definitely a game changer as a dictionary and idiom lookup tool
As someone who speaks both English and Spanish, I can totally understand. Single words and simple phrases might work in most cases. But once you get into translating anything more complex, the results can sometimes be a little... strange. From a few silly errors, to cringy results, to outright making you roll on the floor laughing. Also, if there isn't enough context, the software can have a very hard time producing an accurate result, which only makes things more complicated. To make things simple, don"t have 100% trust in translation services like this. You never know how accurate the translation is if you don't fully understand both languages.
i use google translate in a pharmacy setting where 99% of the time no human translator is available and it often yields good enough results for the job. i have fortunately always instructed customers to rather use more words to describe what they're after so we can have the best possible results. one or few word translations are extremely hit or miss.
languages we often translate from are: thai, vietnamese, russian, ukrainian, armenian, romanian, polish, and more and it's all translated to german.
1:39 Rizz bussin diarrhea.
In the carpentry world, everyone laughs at 'heffe gringo' struggling to type out hos translation to his contractors
The biggest problem with Google translate is missing context, which isn't something that can ever be fixed. Even aside from that it still gets things wrong constantly. In my experience with English to and from Japanese, such as translating "絶望しな", a shortening of "絶望しなさい" as "Don't despair" even though the real meaning is literally the exact opposite (I think it's getting it confused with "絶望するな", which does actually mean "Don't despair".) Also apple translate said "すごい" meant "terrible" even though it actually means "amazing", which I bet has led to quite the misunderstandings.
There is also a problem that different langauges require different information to communicate. For example:
"Видела шарф?"
Currently GT gives a translation of:
"did you see the scarf?"
But the literal translation is "[did you (the female)] see [a/the] scarf?"
There are two issues here,
1. The information that the speaker is asking a woman is lost, which could be useful if, for example, in a book a detective enters a room and asks this question directly to the only woman there, in a translation you wouldn't know who he was talking to.
2. The information of "a" vs "the" is added from nowhere. We dont know if the speaker was asking for just any scarf because its cold outside, or because this one particular scarf contains launch codes. Similarly a translation FROM English would lose this information
4:54 “French people don’t use rocket science or brain surgery as benchmarks for difficulty they use sorcery.
My language classes have always forbidden using Google Translate for assignments, for this very reason.
1:52 The feedback feature is being gradually phased out in Google Translate, I can’t use it anymore.
I'm doing a phd in machine translation and was worried about the title but you guys did a good job covering of some of the challenges in the field
I'm sorry captain, the UT is having trouble locking on.
Apparently their ship has taken on severe fish and is venting McDonalds Big Macs.
A couple other commenters have noted, this is not just a Google Translate problem, there are some things that literally can't be translated between languages, even by humans, sometimes without a loss of nuance, and sometimes at all.
@1:17 you can actually do the Yoda interpretation: *My teacher yesterday by a bus was hit* _(do that with the yoda voice for a good day)_
On the subject of artistic choice, that is a very good point; one phrase might sound poetic or romantic in one language but will come off as weird, awkward, or maybe even creepy in another. Certain imagery and words might come off as badass and epic in a war speech of one language and absolutely laughable and cringey in another.
"google translate is actually terrible"
I figured that out when "Bonjour" got translated as 'english' using detect language.
I remember using this religiously to complete my French assignments back in the mid-2000s. The accuracy really hasn't advanced much since then.
In the film/tv world theres a term 'transcreation' often the 'correct' accurate "technically" is just inappropriate and doesn't actually convey the onscreen vibe. Translators have to re-work what was said to better fit the local cultures of the translantion. But (even harder when adding dubbing into the mix) make it fit length wise with the onscreen shots (and in terms of dubbing even fit within the same length of time a speakers mouth moves).
Effective translation, be it for a court, or a film, requires a lot of additional context as to how the translation is to be used. Again, how you would do translation for a court transcript is vastly different than for a TV screen even if what was said was virtually the same.
Its a really interesting field that (from the film/tv side) requires a lot or creativity and skill which is something we know computers struggle with.
I'm all for pushing good ai automation of menial human tasks into the world, but equally there has to be appreciation of areas where it just will never be good enough to be left as the be all and end all. We tend to worry about AI taking over everyones jobs, and for some sectors I can understand that feels real, but within all areas of work there are some things humans can just do better (and would be able to do faster with ai help) and there will always be enough jobs that fill all sectors and skillsets, they are just going to be different to what they are now.
Say what you want about google translate, but a friend of mine was going to Japan, she speaks 0 japanese or English, so in an nothing to lose effort, I downloaded 2 apps to translate, first one didn't work at all, google translate made some rough translations but it made it possible to have an akward conversation in Japanese to Spanish, and vice versa, finding things and ordering on the menu, also using the public transportation. My take, that is a huge win. I'm planning myself a trip to Japan and have been studying some Japanese but if everything fails, I know I can have a backup in English and google translate
This is the difference between translation and localization. Simply converting words and even sentence structure from one language to another isn't enough in artistic works, you have to know the context and author intent to be able to fully map a phrase in one language to be fully understood in another language. And even then, you have to take regional dialects into account - think of not just American vs. British english, but also Cockney rhyming slang, for example.
Don't know why, but I feel like in past few years, Google Translate became worse.
Previously it was like missing idiom or two, maybe grammatically it would be little bit off, but nothing serious, pretty easy to fix.
Now it can't suggest good translation - not for words, not for sentences, not for longer texts.
I just can't trust it anymore... Have to use other sites, like Reverso, to pick fitting translation from variety of synonyms...
And it's all just a huge waste of time.
Translation software is useful for getting a basic idea like while playing a JP only retro game, or if you know the language somewhat - like I can read Hangul but I'm far from even basically fluent or anything, so I can get pronunciation or recognize things that otherwise wouldn't come across especially in romanized Korean.
As a hobbits translator, this video hit home close. One thing very difficult to translate are songs and phonetic jokes. Songs because the lyrics are to the measure of the beat, but some words translate to longer ones. An example is "parking lot". Three syllables. In spanish however that is "estacionamiento". Six syllables.
An example of phonetic jokes is in Spangebob when they try to make a little Texas for Sandy by making "square dance", "barbed Qs", "pea can pie", and "10 gallon hats". In the latinamerican sub they say "we have squares, giant anchovies, home-made pies, and 38 liter hats"
@@Morimea indeed. The steam settings in the spanish translation, instead of saying "opciones" or "configuraciones", it says "parámetros". Why parameters?
As a linguist turned tech person, I agree with everything they are saying in this video. However, I would like to add one caveat. If you’re just personally trying to read something, like an article, or even a novel in a pinch, Google translate is not bad. It can get the main point across, it might be a bit stilted, or confusing, but you can figure it out, at least for some of those 94% languages.
As someone who speaks both English (learned as an adult) and Spanish (native), let me tell you that even that 94% accuracy leaves a lot to be desired. Like sure, compared to what it was a decade ago it's night and day, but it can screw up in ways that no (decent) human translator would ever do due to its inability to understand context. It can be specially noticeable in longer texts because it struggles to "remember" who or what is talking about and it starts to commit grammatical errors.
On the other hand it's amazing for translating short sentences, specially slang (as long as it is popular slang) since it has learned from sources that dictionaries generally won't touch with a ten foot pole. It's also great for finding synonyms or equivalent expressions... and checking orthography of less obvious stuff like alternative spellings.
I'd say that you can totally use it to navigate your way through a webpage written in a language you can't read, but never trust it enough to translate a big block of text and then copy-paste it as is somewhere else assuming it's correct or that it even makes sense, specially if it's in a professional context which sadly is so common to see.
They're at least making it easy in some form by contributing to the world.
I can now talk to talk 20 different ethnic groups in India just because of Google Translate which i never imagined could've been possible, here.
instead of critiquing them, i'd ask them to do much better.
that's how we as Software Developer's support each other.
For me, I had to synthesize some hate and offensive speech for a project - I wrote a python script that used Google Translate to process a CSV file from English to Polish, read it, decided to try English to French, much better - then back to English. From ~500 entries I synthesized about 80% "new"entries. Obviously sometimes the context was lost, but the wording was still hateful/offensive. It was what I needed to get better detection results.
I use google translate fairly often because I write a lot and have issues with remember certain words so I have to use both my second language and my primary language to figure it out, but in doing so, I sometimes notices that the translate is wrong. It usually happens when a word has double meaning in one of the languages or if a word sounds similar, but still it's really not right. Last time I noticed this was during a check of how to write a certain food related word and the translated word wasn't even close to be a food. And it only gets worse if I try the same thing with a sentence, then it gets it wrong a lot. Thankfully I'm mostly looking for how to write the word correctly as my stupid mind has a bit if issues with words sometimes. But that only makes those errors so much noticeable when the translating helps me remember the word I'm looking for that my mind refuses to remember until I see it. It's really annoying, but I only bother to push out corrections if it's really wrong.
Before Don Quixote, there's a background documenting the history of translation attempts, including by men unskilled at Spanish, skilled only at modern Spanish, and skilled at the language but unfamiliar with the time it was written in. Each one varies in value, but the highest value exists in reading the original Spanish version. How can AI compete with those?
I think a middle ground could until we get more sophisticated creative solutions would be just to identify slang, idioms, metaphors etc maybe there could be a dictionary of them that can kept being updated etc and instead of translating the slang or metaphor etc the program could just figure out the grammer where it is supposed to be placed and then just write it word to word in the other language's script. For example translating from Japanese to English, maybe they have used a slang in the sentence, take arigato(imagine it in kanji characters) for example of slang, instead of translating it to thank you it could just write it as arigato(in English characters) this would put the onus on the individual to then search what does arigato mean, but this would allow the translation to be more fluid and easy to understand. Explanations to said slag/idiom etc is usually straightforward, they might not understand "apples to oranges" but if they translated its meaning (comparing things that can't be compared or are far from each other) they will be able to get a translation that makes sense in their language while maintaining the quality of the words spoken. Yes this is not good for a flow of conversation or something, but its better for comprehension overall and maybe should be an option that can be opted for better comprehension.
That AGI robot arm at the end giving me serious LIMBO spider-leg vibes...
back in my day techquickie didn't have a midroll sponsor spot 😥
Google translate is actually awesome... that is the reason why videos like "lost in translation" exist. It is always entertaining to put for example few pages of a random book to Google translate, perform the translation between multiple languages and then back to the original one and you can actually read some entertaining story. (Sometimes Google translate will make a Creepypasta out of innocent stories)
I'm Dutch and I never translate anything from Dutch to another language, I use English because it's always more accurate. Even so, I'm trying to learn Russian and have frequently gotten nonsensical answers when trying to translate lyrics from songs. It'll usually help a bit if you input more of the text around it for context, but it's just not that good yet. Let's hope AGI can fix it.