Google Translate: Will this new function kill foreign rights?

[Suzanna]

Yep, this will fail. I went to a German website the other day and ran it through the Google translator which translated the whole site into English - I gave up reading after a couple of paragraphs. The phrasing was clunky and difficult to understand in parts.

[rogue_librarian]

Of course it's no replacement for human translation, yet anyway. That said, I wouldn't want to miss it. If I encounter a website in Russian, or Spanish, or Chinese, at least I can understand the gist of it. I'm not reading literature that way, but it certainly has its (quick & dirty) uses.

[Sil_liS]

Google translate is supposed to be able to learn. If you are trying to translate something and it makes a mess of the translation, you can offer a better suggestion. I'm guessing that not many do that, so this is a slow learning process.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

Of course it's no replacement for human translation, yet anyway. That said, I wouldn't want to miss it. If I encounter I website in Russian, or Spanish, or Chinese, at least I can understand the gist of it. I'm not reading literature that way, but it certainly has its (quick & dirty) uses.

Agreed - for that purpose it's an excellent resource. But for reading novels? Certainly not.

[odiakkoh]

Even human translation sucks a lot of the time (subbed movies), ai sucks even more. My friend tries talking to me in japanese using google translate and it never makes any sense. Its good with individual words but sentences are always weird.

[khalleron]

Not to mention that every time I log into Pandora, Google Translate tells me the site is in Indonesian.

What's up with that?

[J. Strnad]

I'd love it if machine translation could even be used to help human translators work faster and cheaper. Mainly, cheaper.

I've looked into having RISEN translated to German and the cost is in the $17,000 - $19,000 range, which is completely unaffordable by a wide margin. The print book and ebook combined haven't made me that much money!

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by J. Strnad

I'd love it if machine translation could even be used to help human translators work faster and cheaper. Mainly, cheaper.

I've used google translate when I needed to translate a large text between English and my mother language. There are sections where it is easier to ignore the translation because of the time it takes to make sense of what went wrong in the process, but half the time the only thing that is needed is to change the position of words in the sentence, a few prepositions, and maybe the gender of some words.

So I can tell you that it can make the process faster, but I think that if you suggest this to a translator, you might get a price increase.

[Lirael]

Being as last time I used Google translate it couldn't tell the difference between Finnish and Estonian, I wouldn't worry about it just yet...

[Elfwreck]

Google translate is useful for getting the gist of news articles in languages I don't read (which is pretty much all of them); it's useless for nuances.

It might be a boon to book translators, in being able to do the bulk of the translating poorly-but-quickly, and then needing extensive proofing & cleanup. Just like even bad OCR followed by proofing is faster than typing an entire book, the auto-translate may speed up the translation process.

I think Google translate is much, much less of a threat to publishers than TTS is to audiobooks. TTS may be flat, but at least it gets most of the words right. The story is still all there. Google translate is unpleasant for news, useless for literature, and hilarious for song lyrics and poetry.

One of the blog-based meme-games that goes around sometimes is "Pick a verse of a song you like. Throw it in Google translate 3 times: English to Japanese, Japanese to Russian; Russian back to English. Post the results, and see if anyone recognizes the song." The number of steps & suggested languages vary; generally, people identify the songs by a keyword or two in the chorus. The meaning is often shifted around, and the emotional impact is entirely lost in the scrambled rephrasings.

[CommonReader]

Some time ago I bought an inflatable pool for the kids. The German manual advised me to clear the lawn of all computer protocols before filling it. This seemed to be a somewhat unexpected precaution, so I consulted the English version which advised of clearing the lawn of all "logs". That is still the kind of translation quality you can expect..

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by OtterBooks

due to the complexity of idiom, colloquialisms, and other such things, decent translation will require near-sentient AI educated in the culture and language of the respective material. At that point we won't be far off from hiding out in underground bunkers as killer robots roam the earth, anyway.

+1 on that

machine translation still chokes on simple things like is key meant as in the lock opener or the button to press?
now go on and think about more subtle differences between languages.