
Google translates German “halb zwei” to French “deux heures et demie”: 1h off - jraph
https://translate.google.com/#de/fr/halb%20zwei
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wyldfire
To help my fellow English-speakers:

"halb zwei" ("half two") is the German idiom for "halfway [between one and]
two o'clock"

"deux heures et demie" ("two hours and one half") is a much better cognate for
the English "half past two o'clock"

We're all used to off-by-one and fencepost errors. To be honest, this is
probably a less interesting one of Google translate's mistranslations. But
it's one that's very mechanical and we would expect a machine to get something
like this right.

~~~
p49k
To make things even more confusing, “half two” means 2:30 in the UK and
Ireland.

~~~
yAnonymous
Unlike the German and French versions, that doesn't make any sense at all.

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elthran
It's a colloquial contraction of "half past 2". To me, the German makes no
sense - half of 2 is 1.

Agreed though that the French is the most easily understood internationally.

~~~
netsharc
If you think of the minute hand needing to complete the full circle to reach
2, "Half two" means the minute hand has only completed half that circle, so
it's 1:30.

I've even heard of "three quarters (of) two" in German, which means 1:45.

~~~
Lev1a
You probably mean the German expression "dreiviertel zwei". This expression is
however not used everywhere in Germany because in other regions it may be said
as \- "viertel vor zwei" (approx. "quarter to two") or \- "Dreizehn (Uhr)
fünfundvierzig"/"Ein Uhr fünfundvierzig" (The exact time as you would read it
off of a (digital) clock/watch)

When I imagine it from the English-speakers perspective, I think "viertel"
(quarter), "halb" (half) and "dreiviertel" (three quarters) are probably to be
understood like this:

"halb zwei" = "half two" = "1/2 2" = (2 - 1 hour) + ((1/2) * 1 hour) = 1.5 =
01:30

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wibr
Um halb drei -> À trois heures et demie

Um halb drei gehen -> Aller à deux heures et demie

Um halb drei gehen wir -> A quatre heures et demie nous partons

Um halb drei gehen wir ins Kino. -> A trois heures et demie nous allons au
cinéma.

~~~
wibr
For DeepL:

-> À trois heures et demie

-> 14 h 30 du soir,

-> À 14 h 30,

-> On va au cinéma à 14h30.

Correct for everything but the first, not sure why it added "du soir". For the
a complete sentence "Um halb drei gehen wir." it's also correct ("On part à
14h30.").

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
As far as I can tell it's _in_correct in every instance except the first:

    
    
      À trois heures et demie = À trois heures et demie
    
      Aller à deux heures et demie =\= 14 h 30 du soir [1]
    
      A quatre heures et demie nous partons =\= À 14 h 30 [2]
     
      A trois heures et demie nous allons au cinéma. =\= On va au cinéma à 14h30 [3]
    

[1] misses the "to go" part and also gets the time of day wrong- which is
important because it uses 24-hour clock notation (and so it's obvious that it
has no idea what 14h30 means).

[2] completely misses the action ("nous partons") and gets the time wrong
("quatre heures" is " _four_ o'clock", not 14).

[3] Still gets the hour wrong (14h30 to "trois heures", i.e. three).

You'd certainly wouldn't want those translations to "help" you with your
appointments in France, or Germany.

~~~
wibr
I was only referring to the time. "halb drei" is two thirty, which usually
means 14:30 unless you specifically say "in the morning". The action in [2]
would probably be added if you add a full stop.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
The time is also wrong, in three out of the four cases above.

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tirant
Same when translate it to Spanish: Dos y media.

On the other hand, it is correctly translated to Dutch (half twee), and
English (half past one).

If you translate English to Spanish and French, then the correct time appears.

On the other hand, from Dutch to Spanish/French, it does not know it's time,
and does a literal translation -> half of two.

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franze
i hate this kind of time communicating

in austria there is

"viertel zwei" \- quarter two

which in one part of austria (vienna) means 1:15pm (or 1:15am), in the other
half (90% of austria) it is understood as 1:45pm (or 1:45am), sometimes as
2:15pm (or 2:15am) - but never as 1:15pm/am

"viertel [vor/nach] zwei" \- quarter [to/after] two. the [] are optional.

~~~
StavrosK
Wait, why does "viertel zwei" mean 1:15? What's "viertel eins"?

~~~
gpvos
Viertel zwei = a quarter of the second hour has passed, i.e., it's 1:15. It's
a logical extension of the standard-language "halb zwei". But note that this
is only used and understood in some German-speaking regions, not all!

~~~
RBerenguel
It works the same in Catalan: un quart de dues is 1:15, as in "one quarter of
the hour 2". If we go full into it, we have as valid and used constructs "un
quart i mig de dues" for anything around 1:21-1:23 (one quarter and a half of
2, which would be 1:22.5)

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zwieback
Germans like to reference time relative to the half hour, e.g. "fuenf vor halb
drei" for 2:25 or even "zehn vor halb drei" for 2:20, etc.

Do other cultures do that?

Also, google gets "fuenf vor halb drei" wrong but "fuenf vor halb zwei"
correct, it seems pretty random. "Fuenf nach halb eins" is 1:35 instead of
12:35 and "fuenf nach halb drei" is 5:30 instead of 2:35!

~~~
hrydgard
Swedish does it but only the five before/after half case, not 10. And
generally no other number than five actually. Examples: "Fem över halv två
(13:35)" or "fem i halv fyra (15:25)".

~~~
vidarh
Norwegian too. Though other numbers than 5 but rarely _more_ than 5 tends to
be acceptable. E.g. "tre på halv fire" (15:27) works, but it's rare to use it
to be more precise than with five. If you want to be that precise people are
more likely to resort to saying the specific minute of the hour ("tre tjuesju"
or "tre syv og tyve"; the latter is "old fashioned" and from Danish but still
frequently used), alternatively with 15 instead of 3 if even remotely
ambiguous.

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Grue3
English to Russian is also wrong

[https://translate.google.com/#en/ru/Half%20past%20one](https://translate.google.com/#en/ru/Half%20past%20one)

"Half past one" = 1:30

"Половина первого" ("half of the first") = 0:30

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teniutza
DeepL[0] outputs the same.

[0] [https://www.deepl.com/translator](https://www.deepl.com/translator)

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teekert
Interestingly it does do the Dutch "half twee" correctly, to French and back.
Moreover, halb zwei is translated to half twee and back normally. So there is
no inter-dependency or translation "via English" or something.

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d__k
Here is what [https://translate.yandex.com](https://translate.yandex.com)
says:

    
    
      halb zwei -> une heure et demie (FR)
      halb zwei -> half two (EN)

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daveguy
Not familiar with either language. What are the English translations of these
two phrases?

~~~
LyndsySimon
"Halb zwei" is "half two". It means "1:30".

~~~
daveguy
Ahh and it's being translated to 2:30. Stark evidence that Google translate
doesn't really "understand" anything yet.

~~~
rvense
I don't think anyone would claim that it does, except maybe Google Marketing
and a few blue-eyed computational linguists - who would probably do themselves
a favour by focusing a little more on the linguistics of the endeavour.

It is a text-to-text machine translation system. There is, as far as I know,
no attempt at an internal representation of anything like semantics or
knowledge about the world. They may have added some grammatical facts, but
there is no model of the world and no notion of time like a person would use
to make or understand statements in natural language.

Case in point: The artifacts of the training processes behind machine
translation systems like Google Translate cannot be used to generate sentences
from pictures or notions or anything like that. What is happening is nothing
like a human learning a language, or even a pair of languages.

That's not to say it's not impressive, useful and important tech, mind, but it
really does not do all of what it appears to do at first glance.

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ramblerman
I wonder if this is just due to a lot of translated documents getting it
wrong. And thus having mis-trained the ai.

~~~
md_
I have wondered if it's not an increasingly difficult problem for Google
Translate that, as it becomes more popular, it is likely to see more and more
training data which it itself helped generate.

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matt4077
Translations: 1:30 and 2:30, respectively. Or, literally, "half two" and "two
hours and half".

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lnx01
Afrikaans>English is also wrong:
[https://translate.google.com/#af/en/half%20twee](https://translate.google.com/#af/en/half%20twee)

original af: half twee (01:30) incorrect en: half past two (02:30) correct en:
half past one (01:30)

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Symbiote
Other common mistakes are with measurement units and currency.

I often see things like "20 litres of fuel cost 300kr" translated to "20
gallons of fuel cost $300".

I can't reproduce this in a short sentence, it tends to happen when I
translate a large block of text.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Machine translation is so frequently and so badly wrong that it can't be
trusted at all. I guess it keeps translators in a job when it can't even get
basic things right, let alone complex translation.

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dmtroyer
Suggest an edit.

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mhd
For "viertel" (quarter), German itself isn't without its regional ambiguities,
though.

~~~
eru
There are two different conventions, but I never saw any ambiguity:

One convention is "viertel vor zwei" (13.45) / "viertel nach zwei" (14.15),
the other convention popular in the east and southwest is "dreiviertel zwei"
(13.45) and "viertel drei" (14.15).

~~~
mh-cx
The ambiguity comes from the problem, when talking to someone from “the other
system“. I remember that my “viertel drei“ was misinterpreted as 15.15 by
someone, who autocompleted this to “viertel nach drei“ following his system.

~~~
eru
Interesting. I never had that problem. Some people can't tell the time in the
'other' system, but they always recognised that it's a system they don't know.

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nraynaud
you had to be better at school!

(in France, the good students are sent to learn German as a third language,
and the bad ones are sent to learn Spanish as a third language, knowing German
is a marker of class)

~~~
Momquist
I can confirm that in my generation, at least, learning German was seen as a
more elitist choice than Spanish. Latin/Greek were optional and very few chose
to study them. Ironically at the time I felt that Latin classes were easier,
and even more interesting than modern languages, e.g.: we were reading already
Cicero in our first year.

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soVeryTired
Maybe it's a timezone thing...

~~~
gpvos
[https://www.xkcd.com/1883/](https://www.xkcd.com/1883/)

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htssouza
the same problem for Portuguese...

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matt4077
I like to imagine this is just the algorithm picking up on cultural
stereotypes.

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bapf
Depending on where in germany you are, this is actually correct. The term
"halb zwei" can mean 13h30 or 14h30 depending on which region in germany the
speaker originates from.

~~~
Max_Mustermann
Could you mention in what regions it could mean _2:30_? Never heard of it and
a quick search on google ergab nichts.

(edited)

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tom_mellior
[no longer relevant, parent was corrected]

~~~
Max_Mustermann
Yep, thanks, just corrected it.

