I can confirm: I took some of the most difficult text I could find (some articles from lesswrong.com) and translated them from English to German with Google... the German translation is very close to perfect now- Comparable to any manual translation I could do on my own, being fluent in both languages.
I'm not sure if the Portuguese->English translation just isn't as good as English->German, but it's certainly nowhere close to a fluent manual translation.
In fact, the main difference seems to be less tripping up on mostly inconsequential small pieces of English grammar. It seems to have the same trouble as the old version in translating the meaning of sentences.
I tested a douzen sentences (English to German with texts from lesswrong.com) and it is very good, but not very close to perfect; I could spot a minor error in nearly every sentence.
EN: As we wrap up the 2016 survey, I'd like to start by thanking everybody...
DE: Als wir die Umfrage 2016 abschließen, möchte ich zunächst allen danken...
EN: This seems consistent with the hypothesis that the LW community hasn't declined in population so much as migrated into different communities.
DE: Dies scheint im Einklang mit der Hypothese, dass die LW-Gemeinde nicht in der Bevölkerung sank so viel wie in verschiedene Gemeinden abgewandert.
The first sentence is probably better started with "Zum Abschluss" than "Als wir abschliessen".
The second sentence is not wrong per se, I am having trouble coming up with a better translation. I'd probably use Communities instead of Gemeinden, as Gemeinde is more municipality or parrish, and the original sentence refers to online communities, which for me are not entailed in Gemeinde(in this context at least).
"Als" is not correct here. It should be "Da wir die Umfrage 2016 abschließen ..."
In the second example it should be "... dass die LW-Gemeinde in der Bevölkerung nicht sank sondern eher in verschiedene Gemeinden abgewandert ist."
But I'm having a hard time translating "so much as" in this context to German.
"Zum Abschluss der Umfrage 2016 möchte ich zunächst Ihnen allen danken". Note the "Ihnen", which isn't there in English but required for an idiomatic translation.
"Dies scheint im Einklang mit der Hypothese, dass die LW-Gemeinde nicht in der Bevölkerung abgenommen hat, sondern eher in andere Gemeinden abgewandert ist". Note that the "not so much" qualifier is applied to the first half in English, but the second half in German ("sondern eher" → "but rather").
"In the medieval time of a roman emperor who had no regard for life and engaged in the most atrocious habits of mass slaughter, babarian footsteps made it all the way to the capitol."
In der mittelalterlichen Zeit eines römischen Kaisers, der keine Rücksicht auf das Leben hatte und sich mit den grauenhaftesten Gewohnheiten der Massenschlachtung beschäftigte, machten babarische Schritte den ganzen Weg bis zum Kapitol.
I don't think I agree with 'very close to perfect'. Just entering a random sentence I got the following:
Humans are far better than other species at altering our environment to suit our preferences.
Die Menschen sind weit besser als andere Arten bei der Veränderung unserer Umgebung, um unsere Vorlieben.
The German is pretty much wrong and the actual meaning of the original sentence is hard to deduce in my opinion. That being said, computer translation has come very far in the last decade.
Even though I appreciate the quality of the new translation, on the translation example on the image with the 2 phones, I find the old translation more insightful (even if not grammatically correct) than the new one.
I.e. I prefer: "No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that they have arisen" to "Problems can never be solved with the same way of thinking that caused them"
I agree, this seemed like a poor choice for demonstrating the improvements in translation. I would personally translated it as "No problem can be solved via the same manner of thinking as caused them".
I believe they're referring to a babelfish-like device of the namesake, though it would be a nice touch if they could get the copyright for such a device.
So one thing I wonder about is how well "smoothness" of the translated text reflects accuracy of the translation.
What I mean is, we already know several really impressive examples of how language models from recurrent neural networks can generate eerily natural random texts (e.g. this blogpost http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)
So even if we just trained it on an English corpus and fed random numbers into it, it would still output smooth and natural-sounding English sentences. Of course, here it is actually translating, but I wonder how often it will be "overconfident", i.e. generate a plausible-sounding sentence which doesn't at all correspond to the input text. Unlike a human translator, it won't say "sorry I'm not sure what that means".
Since they listed Japanese in the list of languages, I went ahead and took the first news on yahoo japan, which was translated to:
"Government and ruling parties will raise the upper limit of the annual income (under 1,300,000 yen) of spouses subject to deduction to 1.3 million yen or 1.5 million yen, over the review of spousal deduction, which is the focus of the tax reform debate focused on in the 2017 tax reform debate I entered the adjustment with the plan. If the annual income of each husband exceeds 13.2 million yen (11 million yen for "income" minus the amount deemed necessary expenses for work), 11.2 million yen (9 million yen same), it is excluded from the system. The ruling party taxation study committee will review these two plans and aim to include it in the tax reform outline of FY2005"
Seems like there's still a long way to go.
(Copy/pasted original text:
２０１７年度の税制改正議論で焦点となっている配偶者控除の見直しを巡り、政府・与党は、控除対象となる配偶者の年収上限（１０３万円以下）を１３０万円か１５０万円まで引き上げる案で調整に入った。それぞれ夫の年収が１３２０万円（仕事の必要経費とみなされる額を差し引いた「所得」では１１００万円）、１１２０万円（同９００万円）を超える場合は制度の対象外とする。与党税制調査会はこの２案を軸に検討し、１７年度税制改正大綱に盛り込むことを目指す)
I wonder how it went from １０３万円以下 to "under 1,300,000 yen"
I've tried translating some paragraphs from English to Japanese and back and it now seems intelligible enough to be useful. Previously, it produced complete gibberish.
The mistake you pointed out seems rather odd. Computers are supposed to be good at arithmetic. With my limited knowledge of Chinese (that part is all Kanji) even I would get that right (under 1,030,000JPY). But that's the problem with neural or statistical translation - even with the code available, you can't easily tell why it's happened.
Perhaps it got confused because １３０万円 appears later in that sentence.
Actually the English translation seems to produce surprisingly well formed sentences. I'm not a native English speaker, and these kinds of long winded sentences with numbers in them are always confusing, but at least I don't see any _obviously_ malformed phrase.
The system has lost track of the subject (the government and ruling party) and put in "I" as the most likely candidate. This error is pretty dumb, to be honest, and no halfway competent human would make this mistake.
>What's the part of the sentence that follows it supposed to mean?
"entered the adjustment with the plan" is for ～案で調整に入る, which is quite difficult political lingo. The sentence should begin "the government and ruling party have entered discussions regarding (two different) proposals to raise the ..."
>each husband?
"Each" should be "[under] each plan"; the original omits the subject. Figuring out the meaning of それぞれ here would be hard for a lot of quite advanced Japanese learners, I think.
>funny, it translated １７年度 as meaning 平成１７年
Actually this is the more common interpretation - if it didn't say 2017 earlier in the text this would be a pretty safe bet. I guess they don't do text-level analysis yet?
---
Anyway, I agree with what everyone else is saying - this is an impressive leap in making intelligible output for JtoE, but as a translator I'm not fearing for my job just yet.
それぞれ夫 is literally each husband. While the introductory sentence uses the gender neutral 配偶者 (Spouse), this sentence actually does appear to make the assumption that husbands are the ones claiming the deduction and not wives (which is probably true in 90% of cases).
When taken out of context, that would be true. That's however not the case in the original full text. See getoj's sibling reply. It would be clearer if there were a comma between それぞれ and 夫, though, but I don't know if that's my French bias wanting punctuation or if that would be "idiomatic".
I actually think this update is now worse for at least Japanese -> English. The sentences it produces are now often much more readable, and much more wrong. Without some background in the language there is no way for the user to tell; previously where it lacked a match it would produce a translation that made it obvious it wasn't able to grok the meaning, now it seems to 'fill in the blanks' in a way that makes the sentence readable in English regardless. I guess this is much like a non-skilled human translator, but given the assumption that Google knows all this gives a false impression of the accuracy. It would be really helpful I think if Google Translate would provide some kind of confidence level on its accuracy for a translation - a bar graph, stars, something...
Phone typing has created a similar problem just within English. Typos are easy to interpret, and virtually never affect the meaning of a phrase. Random word substitutions are much harder, and are quite likely to make the phrase in which they appear into complete nonsense.
It translated okay for me, perhaps you meant 130万?
> I wonder how it went from １０３万円以下 to "under 1,300,000 yen"
There is no million in Japanese counting, but 1万(man) is 10000. I think google did this to make reading easier, as otherwise you would have to make this conversion in your head when reading.
Find it really interesting that Google Cloud Platform customers get access to this immediately.
Bodes well for Google cloud, putting out your latest and greatest eases my thoughts as to whether its a first class citizen within Google. (I know the head of the Cloud unit is on Google's board which was a major sign of taking 'cloud' seriously.)
Simple: I just don't see the point on using these new TLDs, they are confusing, it's not clear how the work and stupidly expensive... Seems just as an snobby thing.
Because we (not we as in the people but ICANN or whoever's in charge) are allowing corporations to use trademarks as top level domains. While before the top level domains belonged to countries or were general, now they can also be populated by those rich enough. Personally I see it as brands encroaching on a previously "public" space. Would Google allow me to register fuck.google or anything that could damage their brand? I highly doubt it. I wouldn't find it so bad if any joe schmo could create their own TLD, but this is an instance of allocating address space to the most powerful and letting control it as free advertising. It's not a technical problem by any means, but I see it as a moral one.
Well fuckMicrosoft.com was a thing [0], unless with the .google.com thing you meant as some kind of subdomain on Google's site. I don't think those are available for registration anyway. Also, FWIW, a .sucks TLD exists. [1]
Wow I looked at this between Korean and English -- it's very impressive. Amazing, in fact, b/c Korean and Japanese seem to be the hardest to get right(?). There were inaccuracies but in the past even getting the gist of something was difficult. I then tried translating newspaper text from Korean to French, but that was making far more mistakes... Also, going from English to Korean is better but, for example, "I'll go nuts" turns into "I'll bear fruit" (나는 열매 맺을거야) and so on. And of course the social / honorific stuff can't be conveyed yet. But it's head and shoulders over the previous versions. Amazing. A bit frightening.
Just reading Korean is really hard for me b/c I'm not Korean... so this should help. It might not help my Korean language skill, though... or will it? Of course it also tends to devalue my skill of reading in Korean... or does it?
I put in a few sentences, and it seems much better. It seemed to have trouble rearranging words and phrases over long distances (due to grammatical differences) before.
In one sense, calculators and computers haven't made learning arithmetic and other math less important. On the contrary.
Maybe in a similar way, by increasing the amount of communication between speakers and writers of different languages, tools like this might actually make language learning _more_ important? Or is that an interesting thought but completely wrong? Perhaps speaking and listening will gain in importance while writing and reading will decrease? Or is it not worth the time and trouble to learn another language anymore?
A penny for your thoughts. (OK, not a real penny ;)
Actually, this tech could actually be a serious setback for language learning and communications in general. It's amazing how many people have taken the time to learn English around the world, which has made business and traveling easier.
Will there still be interest and investment in learning one of the biggest languages in the world, if you can just use translate.google.com? I hope not personally, but it does make me wonder if this will put things back somewhat as we get complacent and lean on technology to translate for us.
Right, that's exactly what I wonder about. It would be a sad irony if universal translation made us _less_ cosmopolitan.
Then again, what about the calculator analogy? I'm sure that when calculators came out, some people must have thought it was the end of arithmetic studying, for example. And, I can do calculus with a machine, but more people study calculus now than ever before. Maybe languages are no different?
Ok, so maybe Socrates wasn't entirely correct, but it doesn't mean his argument holds no value. I mean, how do we measure the impacts books have had on our brains? Learning without correct guidance can become a problem too and books and the internet encourage that, it is becoming a problem in my opinion. Teachers shouldn't yet be replaced by online videos, but they are.
Our brains are shrinking and while some think it's because the brain are growing more efficient, others think it could be that we're becoming less intelligent. In the case of the latter, how do you know technology does not have a hand in this?
This study shows that using GPS technology has affected people's spatial awareness abilities [1]. I've stopped using GPS technology because of this, I no longer wanted to feeling "clumsy" and slow when traveling or hiking. There is also some talk of "The Google Effect" [2].
I'm definitely not anti-books and I'm certainly not anti-progress, but I honestly think it's naive to believe technology is always beneficial to society, always stands for progress, or that we're ready to posses certain technologies.
That's true. That probably sounded more dismissive than I intended. I think we would do well to consider the downsides of new technologies and explicitly accept or reject them instead of just hoping for the best.
I'm not sure about you, but virtually nobody I know can do anything other than basic integer division anymore. The calculator DID cripple our ability to do basic arithmetic.
Yes, nobody calculates in their head above 100 or 1000, but the domain where calculation has really made a difference is in AI and scientific modeling, a domain far away from the small calculator with 4 operations.
Maybe people are going to limit themselves to learning a few words in a foreign language and translate the rest. But in 50 years, maybe all humanity will be learning a new language designed by AGI, a language with concepts that are revolutionary and completely different from ours, that will help us talk to the AGI on its level. Who knows what will come in languages. Google is already using a kind of interlingua to connect from any language to any language.
I don't see it happening. People still have to talk to each other, don't they? I realise google translate can translate your audio input these days, but no matter how good that speech recognition comes it's still much more awkward. It's fine for getting a taxi or getting something at a shop, but unsuitable for a real conversation. It's a bit inappropriate in a business meeting, or in an intimate talk, to speak into your phone and have a synthesised voice give a machine translation of your thoughts.
I welcome advances in machine translation with open arms, but I can only see them as an augmenter, not a replacement. Time will tell.
I mean the quality of the translation is good...but not that good for deep understanding. It is good enough for informational messages, like news stuff, but for things like reading a paper/textbook, where sometimes you need to spend hours to read certain section repeatedly in order to fully understand the meaning behind, this thing is far from being good enough to be useful.
One thing that worries me is that most people might rely on computers instead of learning another language, or driving, navigating, or calculating. Computers then might outsmart us because we've become less intelligent.
A more optimistic view is that machine translation might help those of us who still want to learn other languages. Though I still think grammar rules are needed when learning other languages.
I think humans are going to benefit from a kind of "reverse machine learning" in the future, where AIs will become much more skilled at teaching humans that human teachers. No need to regret the loss of calculation, driving and translation - we don't care about riding and throwing arrows either. We will learn what is relevant in the new age.
This is not the direction that AI is heading, though. It was possible with symbolic AI - expert systems were able to justify their reasoning (Mycin) or critique a user's approach (Attending - abstract at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303587198_Teaching_...), but neural networks are quite opaque and there's no obvious big data approach which would enable them to become good at teaching.
Some people do care about riding and archery, and are right to do so. I even care about and practise foraging for food, lighting fires for cooking on, and navigating using astronomy or compass. It's important to be able to fall back on low technology in case your high technology fails.
To compare it to music it seems to me that human translating will become less used in work contexts. For example historically you either had to be rich enough to hire a musician (or a whole group) if you wanted to hear music. You could also just learn to play yourself. When the gramophone was invented I'm sure those professional musicians for parties didn't have much to do. On the other hand it's still considered positive (even attractive) to be able to play your own music when a computer could create something as well. I've actually wondered before why people learn to play music when they have famous and better music to listen to on their own phone, but there's something there that people like.
When you travel in a foreign country there is a lot of respect given for people who can speak the language that you just don't get from walking around with a human or device translator. You might get a peek into it the same way a DJ mixes together other people's music, but nobody would call them a famous musician (not a great comparison, because there are famous, successful, and talented DJs). Also in terms of understanding a culture a lot of that is formed/built in the language. The phrases and structures of a language definitely have an impact on how people think.
So basically yeah, professional business translators and translator shops will probably go way down in business. They would be seen as some kind of luxury, but language learning as a hobby/to understand a culture isn't related to professional translating at all really.
> In one sense, calculators and computers haven't made learning arithmetic and other math less important. On the contrary.
As an aside, computers aren't really leveraged in mathematics much, outside arithmetic. I've (badly) done some final year undergraduate maths, and found myself still having to jump through algebraic hoops, rather than focusing on the big picture.
I am teaching myself statistics at the moment, and once I learn an equation, I let a CAS do it for me. Again, I am trying to use tools to take care of the lower level details - it's not really useful to do hairy integrals by hand when that's not that point or the level of what you are learning. At least that's my feeling.
Well, I can't learn every language. I speak Hungarian, English, German and some Spanish, but when when I want to read some Russian forums, or a news article in Romanian etc. then without Google translate it would not be possible.
Communicating face-to-face directly is still valued in business, even though we could replace such discussions with e-mail or IM. Humans value the direct and "emotional" connection that talking facilitates. Like intonation, facial expressions, word use etc. It's not the same if they speak to me through a speech recognizer + machine translator + text-to-speech synthesizer pipeline.
The translation industry is $40bn/pa and growing at some 13% pa. Demand for human translation might well rise alongside these innovations as awareness of the benefits and ROI of good translation spreads.
Probably the trend of using translators to edit machine translations will accelerate, but I can't see that as really of benefit to the individual translator.
Definitely post-editing will continue. I was mainly talking about the market itself growing, with the assumption that a large portion of that market will demand high-quality, human translation of marketing copy, instructions and legal texts.
It seems that production versions of these cutting edge techniques come out very soon after the paper is released (in this case just a few months). I wonder how long the internal development process for these big ML efforts are.
I'm not sure this is all that soon. The first paper using RNNs in an encoder-decoder framework from Hinton et al which blew the top off of phrase-based systems' BLEU scores was back in... 2013? It's been a long time.
And it's been an especially frustrating wait because whenever you mention how deep systems have made huge process on translation, someone will be sure to note that Google Translate produces total gibberish for Japanese-English and in general is pretty bad, and then you had to explain that as far as anyone knows, Google may be publishing papers on how RNNs translate great but that doesn't mean they've rolled them out to the public Google Translate yet, which looks like making excuses. Now we get to see a productized version of the RNNs out in the wild.
I tried some Chinese news sites, and more than one paragraph was translated to English perfectly. Very impressive. But my Chinese wife asked me to put in some text from Weibo, China's Twitter clone, and the translations were nearly incomprehensible. She insisted that the samples we chose were not slang but were everyday colloquial Chinese that is easily understood by anyone. My guess is that Google's training set is mainly Chinese news sites, which are a formal type of Chinese that is quite different from spoken Chinese. I wonder if they can scrape Weibo messages to improve their translations.
It's a pity that this graph shows only 3 languages (except for English), I would love to see such graph for all the languages available in google translate.
I tried with some facebook comments and articles posted to facebook in chinese and the results were pretty much incomprehensible as well. It was so bad, it makes me wonder - has google actually enabled this for all users?
Their training dataset is almost certainly biased towards 'formal' Chinese sources, e.g. newspapers, news broadcasts, and so on. This is probably true for every language translation dataset, but at least anecdotally I can confirm the massive disconnect between spoken and written Chinese.
It's really interesting culturally, since modern written Chinese is split between Simplified (PRC) and Traditional (HK/TW/etc), because Mao thought Traditional was too difficult for the proletariat. Yet official national news sources in China are almost always given in formal Chinese, which nobody outside of the elite really speaks!
Written text in SMS and twitter tends to a lot closer to the way people speak, whereas newspapers are a lot more "polished". So there is definitely a bias depending on what you train your algorithm on. Also, topics and vocabulary may differ widely so if you train on newspaper, your algorithm will struggle with phone conversations.
If you are talking about Modern Spoken Mandarin (or written Spoken Mandarin: SMS, social media) vs Modern Written Mandarin I don't think the gap is that large compared to other languages. Certainly a lot less than the gap between written Colloquial English and Formal English (more words of Latin origins).
Looking at the People's Daily website (which is presumably an official news source in China), it looks like standard newspaper Chinese. Should be readable for most Chinese people with at least primary education.
"I don't think the gap is that large compared to other languages"
As someone learning Chinese, I can sympathize with Google Translate. Spoken Mandarin doesn't give you nearly as much context as more modern written Mandarin. I have no problem reading a newspaper but real conversation between Chinese people is just lost on me. It's not just a pace of listening thing, there is just too much of the sentence that isn't said out loud.
The GP was about Weibo messages/posts, and how those written messages reflect colloquial or spoken language much more closely than something from Sina.
This effect is also extremely noticeable in the Finnish language. The rules of Finnish grammar are followed much more strictly when writing any kind of text, than they are when speaking. There are rules of grammar that are always followed when writing, but are not really that important when speaking.
As an example, take the sentence "kirja on työpöydälläni", which means "the book is on my desk". The word "työpöytä" (desk) gets two suffixes, "-llä" which corresponds to the preposition "on", and "-ni" which is the first-person genitive. But when speaking, this would easily come out as "kirja on minun työpöydällä" instead, where the noun doesn't isn't in the genitive form at all anymore, the genitive has become a separate word which is a pronoun with a genitive ("minun").
If you study just the grammatical rules and nothing else, you might think that the second sentence is obviously grammatically wrong. (Because according to the rule, the noun must change its case to correspond to the genitive.) Yet it's completely acceptable to say it aloud that way, even in a formal context, and nobody would bat an eye. While at the same time if you put it this way in any kind of writing, you would almost surely be notified by the grammar police that you have made a grave mistake.
I find this duality of language fascinating. And this will certainly continue producing problems for the field of machine translation. Google Translate is infamous in Finland for being near-useless for translating anything to or from Finnish.
i tried the same with portuguese comments/text where i always felt Facebooks translation was pretty bad and in google translate it is a lot better, to the point you hardly notice it's translated by an algorithm at all.
Actually I still think Google is pretty bad at going between all Portuguese variants.
It puts them all in the same bag, resulting in very strange translations when using it as target language.
Going the other way around, I am yet to properly translate any of the variants into a way that all verbs and articles keep their sense across languages.
For example, translating você to either Du or Sie in German, depending on the Portuguese variant being used.
I tried with some random article from dwnews and it worked very well. Just about the only problems I saw was in verb tenses. For example, in one place the translation used the word "exit", where it seemed to me it would have been better with "have exited" or at least "exited".
This is understandable given the endpoints. Chinese almost completely lacks verb tenses, expecting everything to come from context. But AIUI, English is pretty much the opposite extreme, having more explicit verb tenses than most other languages. So the translation isn't able to fully flesh out from context what the English tense should be, and just gives a reasonable compromise.
It might be a challenge for Google to find big corpora to train on because of the somewhat restricted contexts Written Cantonese has been used in (but more power to them if they can make it work!).
My German (3rd language) is rather horrid, but I thought I'd try with "Es gibt mich Schadenfreude". In return I got "It gives me pleasure". Well, yes, but.. :-)
I then moved on to translating between Norwegian and English, both primary languages of mine (well, the latter for some 16 years), and was thoroughly impressed by the results as long as I stayed away from idioms - well, some. Try something a bit Aussie like "Up sh*t creek in a barbed wire canoe", and it'd fall flat on its face. Then, however it successfully mastered "Bedre med en fugl i hånden enn ti på taket" => "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush".
Overall, that's really quite amazing work that the team has put in.
Ah, thanks! Yes, I do. I was 50/50 between mir and mich there.. Couldn't quite remember the use cases. Really ought to refresh my skills a bit, perhaps by finding some good German C# /asp.net tech sites to peruse.
I gained most of my knowledge from reading Das Amiga-Magazin, which I subscribed to for probably a decade. I was going to flunk before I started reading it, but ended up with nearly best grades (high school). It's surprising how actually wanting to read the subject matter can change things around.
I may sound over optimistic but I feel this is very good for people who are interested in learning new languages. It will surely help people learn many languages with relative ease and low cost. Anyone can try out various sentences from new target language (e.g. German) and at least get a near-enough meaning from google. I can try many variations in simple sentences and get a good start, without having to rely on some human help, which is very costly in terms of money and (more importantly) time. A human teacher will get bored with me asking hundreds of variations to translate for me, but not computer. This is great, at least for me.
Some people are fearing that this means now there is no need for language learning. But I see it differently, it's like how Wikipedia/Internet opened doors of knowledge to all people who are "interested" in knowledge. Now with this tool, we have a door opened to learning other language right from within our home.
The only nagging feeling is all this is google, with google becoming more-and-more evil, this is scary.
You're way better off just doing some reading (and listening to podcasts/radio if you can find materials easy enough). You'll get correct input, you'll learn things that aren't translations of things you would already say in English and you'll pick up more of the culture.
For German, there are tons of extensive reading resources (AKA "graded readers") and tons of podcasts for students.
Google translate for me is good in the pre-intermediate stage of learning. You can shove in groups of words and it's a nice heuristic. But I always keep in mind that it's likely to fall apart on longer sentences - I use it to "Fill the gaps" in grammatical constructs I know. It's a great enabling technique
I got to around upper intermediate in another language last year, and found it much less useful at that point. I was able to spot bad grammar and translations myself - I was much better off picking individual words from the dictionary.
I'm excited to see if these changes trickle down to the Latin model, which has seen improvement over the years but at a pace slower than non-dead/historical languages.
The french translation is pretty bad. The funny thing to try is to double translate english => french => english and compare both texts. If the results are way off, you know the translation is incorrect.
My German colleagues assure me Google's neural network needs a bit more training on that one. I often use Google Translate to go back from the German I have (badly) created to English, as a further check that it's somewhat understandable. In terms of it replacing asking real humans for help... I think it's still a long way away, but good to see Google investing in it.
It clearly failed on context there - "fällig" does mean "due", but when referring to an invoice. "due" isn't used for baby delivery dates in German, the sentence would be structured differently, probably something like "Unser Baby kommt im Januar" (literally "our baby is coming in January"). That's exactly the kind of thing I hoped this new model would catch, but apparently that's still a bit too much to expect.
This one is actually not too bad - there is only a very slight difference between "due" (which can mean both something like "shall be done" and "bound to happen") and "fällig" (which means only "shall be done"). Grammatically and semantically, this almost never matters, it only misses the much higher cultural context of it being slightly weird to refer to a baby as a "task".
At least it's clearly understandable and grammatically correct, and only a slightly odd (distant) phrasing. I wouldn't be surprised at all if I heard someone saying it exactly like that in an off-the-cuff remark.
Interestingly I wouldn't know how to translate the German back to English while preserving the feel of the phrasing. Languages just don't map 1:1.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadIn fact, the main difference seems to be less tripping up on mostly inconsequential small pieces of English grammar. It seems to have the same trouble as the old version in translating the meaning of sentences.
EN: As we wrap up the 2016 survey, I'd like to start by thanking everybody... DE: Als wir die Umfrage 2016 abschließen, möchte ich zunächst allen danken...
EN: This seems consistent with the hypothesis that the LW community hasn't declined in population so much as migrated into different communities. DE: Dies scheint im Einklang mit der Hypothese, dass die LW-Gemeinde nicht in der Bevölkerung sank so viel wie in verschiedene Gemeinden abgewandert.
As a student -> Als student OK As I drove -> Als ich fuhr OK past tense As I start -> Da ich anfage, so ich anfage, während ich ...
I think it's more practical for Germans to adopt the English usage then for you to learn this strange exception;)
The second sentence is not wrong per se, I am having trouble coming up with a better translation. I'd probably use Communities instead of Gemeinden, as Gemeinde is more municipality or parrish, and the original sentence refers to online communities, which for me are not entailed in Gemeinde(in this context at least).
In the second example it should be "... dass die LW-Gemeinde in der Bevölkerung nicht sank sondern eher in verschiedene Gemeinden abgewandert ist." But I'm having a hard time translating "so much as" in this context to German.
"Zum Abschluss der Umfrage 2016 möchte ich zunächst Ihnen allen danken". Note the "Ihnen", which isn't there in English but required for an idiomatic translation.
"Dies scheint im Einklang mit der Hypothese, dass die LW-Gemeinde nicht in der Bevölkerung abgenommen hat, sondern eher in andere Gemeinden abgewandert ist". Note that the "not so much" qualifier is applied to the first half in English, but the second half in German ("sondern eher" → "but rather").
I think stuff like novels or poetry would be way harder.
"In the medieval time of a roman emperor who had no regard for life and engaged in the most atrocious habits of mass slaughter, babarian footsteps made it all the way to the capitol."
In der mittelalterlichen Zeit eines römischen Kaisers, der keine Rücksicht auf das Leben hatte und sich mit den grauenhaftesten Gewohnheiten der Massenschlachtung beschäftigte, machten babarische Schritte den ganzen Weg bis zum Kapitol.
Humans are far better than other species at altering our environment to suit our preferences.
Die Menschen sind weit besser als andere Arten bei der Veränderung unserer Umgebung, um unsere Vorlieben.
The German is pretty much wrong and the actual meaning of the original sentence is hard to deduce in my opinion. That being said, computer translation has come very far in the last decade.
[Insert article about finding nonsense profound.]
The comment here disputes that Einstein would have meant consciousness:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Albert_Einstein#Einstein....
a) "the same consciousness from which they have arisen", or
b) "the same consciousness they have arisen from"
But either is still clumsy because of the repetition of "from" that they necessitate.
"Probleme kann man nie mit derselben Denkweise lösen, durch die sie entstanden sind."
"Problems can never be solved with the same way of thinking through which they have arisen."
Quite impressive, imho.
What I mean is, we already know several really impressive examples of how language models from recurrent neural networks can generate eerily natural random texts (e.g. this blogpost http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)
So even if we just trained it on an English corpus and fed random numbers into it, it would still output smooth and natural-sounding English sentences. Of course, here it is actually translating, but I wonder how often it will be "overconfident", i.e. generate a plausible-sounding sentence which doesn't at all correspond to the input text. Unlike a human translator, it won't say "sorry I'm not sure what that means".
"Government and ruling parties will raise the upper limit of the annual income (under 1,300,000 yen) of spouses subject to deduction to 1.3 million yen or 1.5 million yen, over the review of spousal deduction, which is the focus of the tax reform debate focused on in the 2017 tax reform debate I entered the adjustment with the plan. If the annual income of each husband exceeds 13.2 million yen (11 million yen for "income" minus the amount deemed necessary expenses for work), 11.2 million yen (9 million yen same), it is excluded from the system. The ruling party taxation study committee will review these two plans and aim to include it in the tax reform outline of FY2005"
Seems like there's still a long way to go.
(Copy/pasted original text: ２０１７年度の税制改正議論で焦点となっている配偶者控除の見直しを巡り、政府・与党は、控除対象となる配偶者の年収上限（１０３万円以下）を１３０万円か１５０万円まで引き上げる案で調整に入った。それぞれ夫の年収が１３２０万円（仕事の必要経費とみなされる額を差し引いた「所得」では１１００万円）、１１２０万円（同９００万円）を超える場合は制度の対象外とする。与党税制調査会はこの２案を軸に検討し、１７年度税制改正大綱に盛り込むことを目指す)
I wonder how it went from １０３万円以下 to "under 1,300,000 yen"
The mistake you pointed out seems rather odd. Computers are supposed to be good at arithmetic. With my limited knowledge of Chinese (that part is all Kanji) even I would get that right (under 1,030,000JPY). But that's the problem with neural or statistical translation - even with the code available, you can't easily tell why it's happened.
Perhaps it got confused because １３０万円 appears later in that sentence.
"(...) which is the focus of the tax reform debate focused on in the 2017 tax reform debate I entered the adjustment with the plan."
Where does "I" come from? What's the part of the sentence that follows it supposed to mean?
"If the annual income of each husband exceeds 13.2 million yen"
each husband?
"FY2005"
That one is funny, it translated １７年度 as meaning 平成１７年 (17th year of Heisei era, which is 2005) when what's meant is 2017.
Yeah, but that's totally plausible unless you know this is a text from 2016.
>Where does "I" come from?
The system has lost track of the subject (the government and ruling party) and put in "I" as the most likely candidate. This error is pretty dumb, to be honest, and no halfway competent human would make this mistake.
>What's the part of the sentence that follows it supposed to mean?
"entered the adjustment with the plan" is for ～案で調整に入る, which is quite difficult political lingo. The sentence should begin "the government and ruling party have entered discussions regarding (two different) proposals to raise the ..."
>each husband?
"Each" should be "[under] each plan"; the original omits the subject. Figuring out the meaning of それぞれ here would be hard for a lot of quite advanced Japanese learners, I think.
>funny, it translated １７年度 as meaning 平成１７年
Actually this is the more common interpretation - if it didn't say 2017 earlier in the text this would be a pretty safe bet. I guess they don't do text-level analysis yet?
---
Anyway, I agree with what everyone else is saying - this is an impressive leap in making intelligible output for JtoE, but as a translator I'm not fearing for my job just yet.
When taken out of context, that would be true. That's however not the case in the original full text. See getoj's sibling reply. It would be clearer if there were a comma between それぞれ and 夫, though, but I don't know if that's my French bias wanting punctuation or if that would be "idiomatic".
> I wonder how it went from １０３万円以下 to "under 1,300,000 yen"
There is no million in Japanese counting, but 1万(man) is 10000. I think google did this to make reading easier, as otherwise you would have to make this conversion in your head when reading.
In either case it's wrong.
Bodes well for Google cloud, putting out your latest and greatest eases my thoughts as to whether its a first class citizen within Google. (I know the head of the Cloud unit is on Google's board which was a major sign of taking 'cloud' seriously.)
It's not like they'd let you register fuck.google.com either.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060114103656/http://www.fuckmi...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN#.sucks_domain
Just reading Korean is really hard for me b/c I'm not Korean... so this should help. It might not help my Korean language skill, though... or will it? Of course it also tends to devalue my skill of reading in Korean... or does it?
In one sense, calculators and computers haven't made learning arithmetic and other math less important. On the contrary.
Maybe in a similar way, by increasing the amount of communication between speakers and writers of different languages, tools like this might actually make language learning _more_ important? Or is that an interesting thought but completely wrong? Perhaps speaking and listening will gain in importance while writing and reading will decrease? Or is it not worth the time and trouble to learn another language anymore?
A penny for your thoughts. (OK, not a real penny ;)
Will there still be interest and investment in learning one of the biggest languages in the world, if you can just use translate.google.com? I hope not personally, but it does make me wonder if this will put things back somewhat as we get complacent and lean on technology to translate for us.
Then again, what about the calculator analogy? I'm sure that when calculators came out, some people must have thought it was the end of arithmetic studying, for example. And, I can do calculus with a machine, but more people study calculus now than ever before. Maybe languages are no different?
http://wondermark.com/socrates-vs-writing/
Our brains are shrinking and while some think it's because the brain are growing more efficient, others think it could be that we're becoming less intelligent. In the case of the latter, how do you know technology does not have a hand in this?
This study shows that using GPS technology has affected people's spatial awareness abilities [1]. I've stopped using GPS technology because of this, I no longer wanted to feeling "clumsy" and slow when traveling or hiking. There is also some talk of "The Google Effect" [2].
I'm definitely not anti-books and I'm certainly not anti-progress, but I honestly think it's naive to believe technology is always beneficial to society, always stands for progress, or that we're ready to posses certain technologies.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494407... [2] http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fea...
Not that it's a meaningful thing in itself.
Maybe people are going to limit themselves to learning a few words in a foreign language and translate the rest. But in 50 years, maybe all humanity will be learning a new language designed by AGI, a language with concepts that are revolutionary and completely different from ours, that will help us talk to the AGI on its level. Who knows what will come in languages. Google is already using a kind of interlingua to connect from any language to any language.
I welcome advances in machine translation with open arms, but I can only see them as an augmenter, not a replacement. Time will tell.
A more optimistic view is that machine translation might help those of us who still want to learn other languages. Though I still think grammar rules are needed when learning other languages.
Some people do care about riding and archery, and are right to do so. I even care about and practise foraging for food, lighting fires for cooking on, and navigating using astronomy or compass. It's important to be able to fall back on low technology in case your high technology fails.
When you travel in a foreign country there is a lot of respect given for people who can speak the language that you just don't get from walking around with a human or device translator. You might get a peek into it the same way a DJ mixes together other people's music, but nobody would call them a famous musician (not a great comparison, because there are famous, successful, and talented DJs). Also in terms of understanding a culture a lot of that is formed/built in the language. The phrases and structures of a language definitely have an impact on how people think.
So basically yeah, professional business translators and translator shops will probably go way down in business. They would be seen as some kind of luxury, but language learning as a hobby/to understand a culture isn't related to professional translating at all really.
As an aside, computers aren't really leveraged in mathematics much, outside arithmetic. I've (badly) done some final year undergraduate maths, and found myself still having to jump through algebraic hoops, rather than focusing on the big picture.
I am teaching myself statistics at the moment, and once I learn an equation, I let a CAS do it for me. Again, I am trying to use tools to take care of the lower level details - it's not really useful to do hairy integrals by hand when that's not that point or the level of what you are learning. At least that's my feeling.
Communicating face-to-face directly is still valued in business, even though we could replace such discussions with e-mail or IM. Humans value the direct and "emotional" connection that talking facilitates. Like intonation, facial expressions, word use etc. It's not the same if they speak to me through a speech recognizer + machine translator + text-to-speech synthesizer pipeline.
But software's a good bet too ;)
And it's been an especially frustrating wait because whenever you mention how deep systems have made huge process on translation, someone will be sure to note that Google Translate produces total gibberish for Japanese-English and in general is pretty bad, and then you had to explain that as far as anyone knows, Google may be publishing papers on how RNNs translate great but that doesn't mean they've rolled them out to the public Google Translate yet, which looks like making excuses. Now we get to see a productized version of the RNNs out in the wild.
Human translations of chinese, are rated worse than old google translations of other languages.
It's really interesting culturally, since modern written Chinese is split between Simplified (PRC) and Traditional (HK/TW/etc), because Mao thought Traditional was too difficult for the proletariat. Yet official national news sources in China are almost always given in formal Chinese, which nobody outside of the elite really speaks!
If you are talking about Modern Spoken Mandarin (or written Spoken Mandarin: SMS, social media) vs Modern Written Mandarin I don't think the gap is that large compared to other languages. Certainly a lot less than the gap between written Colloquial English and Formal English (more words of Latin origins).
Looking at the People's Daily website (which is presumably an official news source in China), it looks like standard newspaper Chinese. Should be readable for most Chinese people with at least primary education.
As someone learning Chinese, I can sympathize with Google Translate. Spoken Mandarin doesn't give you nearly as much context as more modern written Mandarin. I have no problem reading a newspaper but real conversation between Chinese people is just lost on me. It's not just a pace of listening thing, there is just too much of the sentence that isn't said out loud.
Go to any USA Today or WSJ article and read a paragraph out loud; no one talks like that.
As an example, take the sentence "kirja on työpöydälläni", which means "the book is on my desk". The word "työpöytä" (desk) gets two suffixes, "-llä" which corresponds to the preposition "on", and "-ni" which is the first-person genitive. But when speaking, this would easily come out as "kirja on minun työpöydällä" instead, where the noun doesn't isn't in the genitive form at all anymore, the genitive has become a separate word which is a pronoun with a genitive ("minun").
If you study just the grammatical rules and nothing else, you might think that the second sentence is obviously grammatically wrong. (Because according to the rule, the noun must change its case to correspond to the genitive.) Yet it's completely acceptable to say it aloud that way, even in a formal context, and nobody would bat an eye. While at the same time if you put it this way in any kind of writing, you would almost surely be notified by the grammar police that you have made a grave mistake.
I find this duality of language fascinating. And this will certainly continue producing problems for the field of machine translation. Google Translate is infamous in Finland for being near-useless for translating anything to or from Finnish.
It puts them all in the same bag, resulting in very strange translations when using it as target language.
Going the other way around, I am yet to properly translate any of the variants into a way that all verbs and articles keep their sense across languages.
For example, translating você to either Du or Sie in German, depending on the Portuguese variant being used.
This is understandable given the endpoints. Chinese almost completely lacks verb tenses, expecting everything to come from context. But AIUI, English is pretty much the opposite extreme, having more explicit verb tenses than most other languages. So the translation isn't able to fully flesh out from context what the English tense should be, and just gives a reasonable compromise.
Even with this mistake, it was quite readable.
I then moved on to translating between Norwegian and English, both primary languages of mine (well, the latter for some 16 years), and was thoroughly impressed by the results as long as I stayed away from idioms - well, some. Try something a bit Aussie like "Up sh*t creek in a barbed wire canoe", and it'd fall flat on its face. Then, however it successfully mastered "Bedre med en fugl i hånden enn ti på taket" => "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush".
Overall, that's really quite amazing work that the team has put in.
I gained most of my knowledge from reading Das Amiga-Magazin, which I subscribed to for probably a decade. I was going to flunk before I started reading it, but ended up with nearly best grades (high school). It's surprising how actually wanting to read the subject matter can change things around.
Some people are fearing that this means now there is no need for language learning. But I see it differently, it's like how Wikipedia/Internet opened doors of knowledge to all people who are "interested" in knowledge. Now with this tool, we have a door opened to learning other language right from within our home.
The only nagging feeling is all this is google, with google becoming more-and-more evil, this is scary.
For German, there are tons of extensive reading resources (AKA "graded readers") and tons of podcasts for students.
I got to around upper intermediate in another language last year, and found it much less useful at that point. I was able to spot bad grammar and translations myself - I was much better off picking individual words from the dictionary.
Our baby is due in January.
goes to
Unser Baby ist im Januar fällig
My German colleagues assure me Google's neural network needs a bit more training on that one. I often use Google Translate to go back from the German I have (badly) created to English, as a further check that it's somewhat understandable. In terms of it replacing asking real humans for help... I think it's still a long way away, but good to see Google investing in it.
Freely translated: "Our baby is going down in January."
Interestingly I wouldn't know how to translate the German back to English while preserving the feel of the phrasing. Languages just don't map 1:1.
"Our baby is being scheduled for January"
which maybe brings some "huh?" But I'm not a native speaker, I'm just trying to get an opinion of these who are.
Just as another data point, I do. I'd only use it sarcastically, like
Und, wann ist denn der kleine Scheißer fällig?