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9 replies

Starya67reply
lemmy.world

You notice it when you look at international instructions on packets of food. The non-English texts have a distinct English vibe even when the product is, say, French or German.

2

Or Microsoft documentation pages which are all sloppily translated by ai without proofreading

1
lemmy.world

For German Dutch is does seem to do it directly. But I think it mostly is because a person has put in the effort for it.

6
gnutrinoreply
programming.dev

Doesn't German -> Dutch basically involve just translating half the words to English and adding a silly accent though?

9
lemmy.ml

Yeah, in my experience it absolutely does translate everything via English. If you need to translate from Ukranian directly to other languages, ironically Yandex Translate is probably your best bet. It's worse at Russian <-> English and Ukranian <-> English but much better at direct pairs between other languages.

6
gegilreply
sopuli.xyz

Are they? I know that its been that way years ago, but now with ai technology, it should be able to translate text not just by the word definition, but also context and conceptual meaning. At lest it is supposed to work this way if they used ai for actually useful stuff and not another slop generator.

2

it should be able to translate text not just by the word definition, but also context and conceptual meaning.

It has been doing that at least since 2016, and it's using LLM-adjacent tech (transformer + RNN) since 2020. The problem is that it still seems to be doing things via English, which is especially problematic for single words with no context. In this example, "зачиняти" means "to close". Google translates it to English as simply "close", which loses the context of which meaning or even part of speech it is. Google then translates it to Japanese, but since the context is lost it assumes that "close" means "near" rather than "block an opening" and translates it as "chikai".

(actually, Yandex Translate fucks this up as well and translates "зачиняти" as "黙れ" (shut up), which is somehow worse)

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