
Found in translation: More accurate, fluent sentences in Google Translate - mattiemass
https://blog.google/products/translate/found-translation-more-accurate-fluent-sentences-google-translate/
======
colordrops
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.

~~~
luke_s
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?

~~~
huac
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!

~~~
xux
It's not a difference between "elite" and "non-elite" paragraph. It's the
difference between written and spoken language.

Go to any USA Today or WSJ article and read a paragraph out loud; no one talks
like that.

~~~
vurpo
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.

------
drcode
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.

~~~
tauchunfall
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.

~~~
superplussed
As a student of the German language, it'd be interesting to know the errors in
the sentences.

~~~
bergjs
"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.

~~~
MagnumOpus
"Not X so much as Y" is pretty much always be translated as "Nicht X sondern
Y". "Sondern" should be used here.

------
malloryerik
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?

~~~
sharpy
That example aside, as a native speaker, I've found the English-to-Korean
translation to be rather good!

------
ageitgey
If you are interested in how neural translation systems like this work and how
they are different than the previous statistical systems, check out
[https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-
part-5-...](https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-
part-5-language-translation-with-deep-learning-and-the-magic-of-
sequences-2ace0acca0aa)

~~~
vilhelm_s
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/](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".

------
personlurking
Let's try (Brazilian) Portuguese:

"Google e Facebook declararam guerra aos sites de Internet que difundem
notícias falsas, que o buscador e a rede social vão impedir que se beneficiem
de seus serviços de publicidade."

"Google and Facebook have declared war on Internet sites that broadcast fake
news that the search engine and social network will prevent them from
benefiting from their advertising services."

_____

After the comma (which Google misses in its English translation), the word
"que" (that) should be translated as "which" in this case. Also, the reflexive
"beneficiar-se" (to benefit onself, used here in the imperative/command tense)
seems to have confused Google, likely due to having missed the comma earlier.
I took out the middle part of the second clause and translated only "que vão
impedir que se beneficiem" and Google got it right, translating it as "which
will prevent them from benefiting".

I have experience translating from BR-PT to EN (and even vice-versa for my own
testing), and BR-PT native speakers have a habit of writing long-winded, run-
on sentences in all sorts of published literature. I'm curious to see Google
understand that aspect, which even trips me up once in a blue moon.

~~~
mbrookes
"once in a blue moon"

That feels like the wrong idiom in this context, just "once in a while" sounds
better.

But I couldn't decide _why_ it sounded wrong, so I googled "once in a blue
moon". I didn't arrive at a conclusion, but:
[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=once+in+a+blue+moon](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=once+in+a+blue+moon)

"once in a blue moon = 1.16699016 × 10-8 hertz"

Huh?!

~~~
personlurking
I'm a native English speaker. Once in a blue moon, although meaning "very
rarely", is fine since I'm using it to say "every so often". But, yes, if we
want to nitpick, "which even trips me up very rarely" doesn't sound great.
Although, "which even trips me up every so often" does work.

~~~
mercer
I couldn't figure out at first why it felt off to me as well, but I think you
hit the nail on the head. It's not _wrong_ , it's just a little off/unusual.

------
Yodoshi
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.)

------
Grue3
Japanese translation has improved recently but it still often generates pretty
silly results. Though this language is one big Winograd schema so it would be
hard to improve without strong AI. Shameless plug for my own Japanese
translation service [http://ichi.moe](http://ichi.moe) which doesn't even
attempt to build a sentence and relies on the user to solve ambiguity.

~~~
merastius
Speaking of Winograd Schema, it seems to manage some pretty simple cases,
which I thought was pretty cool. No idea if it could already do that before
this update, though.

It correctly translated "I asked my son to take my bag because it was very
heavy" and "I asked my son to take my bag because he was very strong"
correctly from French, despite the 'he/it' both being the ambiguous 'il' in
French.

------
glandium
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"

~~~
hasenj
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.

~~~
glandium
There are passages that just make no sense to me in English.

"(...) 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.

~~~
emodendroket
> 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.

~~~
mrpopo
The original text states ２０１７年度.

~~~
emodendroket
So it does. Never mind.

------
WalterBright
It's still a ways from becoming self aware. Here's a piece of an old family
letter in German:

Meine lieben Kinder! Sveben brachte Frl. Moldelen die Rarte von Herrn Thomass
mit du schoene Nachricht, dass R. doch endlich gut in Br. ankam. Was bin ich
froh daruber! Und nun hoffe ich doch schr, dess Roesi Samstag mittag in R.
ankem, sich schrubben u aus schlafen konnte. Dickes, hast Du Dir nichts gehalt
bei der Rums Scheru? Mittwoch ging ich nach Tisch zur Stadt, be- sorgte
Einiges u wollte im Hansahed in der Wilm. Str. haden. Musste aber 2 1/2 St.
werde, dann war es aber sehr schoen. Ich mechte dann das Abendessen u erst um
8 h ging ich rauf ins Zimmer zum Tisch decken de fand ich den Zettel von Frl.
B. mit Frl. Mol. dehns grusse von Dir! Meinen Schrucke koemmt Ihr Euch denken.

My dear children! Sveben brought Ms. Moldelen the Rarte From Mr. Thomass, with
a nice news, That R. finally got well in Br. What I'm glad about it And now I
hope Schr, dess Roesi Saturday noon in R. ankem, Could scrub u from sleeping.
Thick, You have nothing to do with the Rums Scheru? Wednesday, I went to the
city, Caused some u wanted in the Hansahed in the Wilm. Str. Had to be 2 1/2
St., Then it was very beautiful. I want to Then the dinner u went around 8 h I
rise up into the room to cover the table I found the note of Miss B. with Miss
Mol. Dehns greetings from you! My shrine You think.

~~~
c06n
Hi, native German speaker here. Quite a few things in your letter do not make
any sense whatsoever, I suspect that is due to the transcription from the
handwriting. I don't think dialects have much to do with it. E.g. I don't
think "ankem" is dialect, I think that is just a transcription error. "a" and
"e" can look very similar in handwriting.

German hasn't changed that much since the 1940s, however, there are dialects
from the East (Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia) that are dead today. But as far as
I know, they were not that different from today's High German.

Here is what I can guess from your original text. I'll expand the
abbreviations I understand and correct the spelling. The translation is rather
free, I'm trying to catch the sentiment so that the text makes sense to you.

\---

Meine lieben Kinder! Sveben (?, if that's a name I have never heard it)
brachte Fräulein Moldelen die Karte von Herrn Thomas mit der schönen
Nachricht, dass R. doch endlich gut in Br. ankam. Was bin ich froh darüber!
Und nun hoffe ich doch sehr, dass Rosi Samstag Mittag in R. ankam, sich
schrubben und ausschlafen konnte. Dickes, hast Du Dir nichts geholt bei der
... (no idea here)? Mittwoch ging ich nach Tisch zur Stadt, besorgte einiges
und wollte im Hansabad in der Wilhelmstraße baden. Musste aber 2 1/2 Stunden
warten, dann war es aber sehr schön. Ich machte dann das Abendessen und erst
um 8 Uhr ging ich rauf ins Zimmer zum Tisch decken, da find ich den Zettel von
Fräulein B. mit Fräulein Moldelens Grüßen von Dir! Meinen Schrecken könnt ihr
euch denken.

My dear children! Sveben brought Ms. Moldelen the postcard from Mr. Thomas
with the happy news that R. has arrived well in Br. after all. Imagine my
relief! And now I'm hoping very much that Rosi has arrived Saturday noon in
R., and that she was able to clean herself and have a good sleep. Sweety,
didn't you get anything from ...? Wednesday I went into town after the meal,
made some errands and wanted to take a swim in the Hansabad at Wilhelmstraße.
Had to wait for 2.5 hours, but then I had a great time. I then made dinner,
and only at 8 o'clock I went upstairs in the room to set the table, that was
when I found the note from Miss B. with Ms. Moldelen's greetings from you. You
can imagine my shock!

\---

Admittedly the last sentence does not make too much sense. Perhaps I guessed
wrong from your transcription, hard to say.

~~~
moeffju
Sveben should be Soeben

------
planetjones
So for German:

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.

~~~
detaro
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.

~~~
acqq
The baby is "fällig" maybe could be "back"-translated (from that translation)
to English carrying the sense of the awkwardness as

"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.

------
sho_hn
This might create a new problem: Without obvious mistakes like word salad, you
can no longer evaluate the probable quality of a translation. You might read a
translated news article and be oblivious to missing or mistranslated facts,
because the text flows well and sounds convincing. The old method had telltale
signs of breakdown and the resulting text was always clumsy enough to warn
anyone off with regards to trusting it too much. Hmmm. Interesting times.

------
_samihasan_
If they manage to reach 99% translation accuracy of German texts, I say they
achieved a very remarkable feat.

I know that Modern Standard Arabic is not supported yet with the NML system
but I just went and tried the translation for a small excerpt from an article
on DW [1]

"بالرغم من عدم وجود تأكيدات رسمية منها على نيتها للترشح مجددا، قال قيادي بارز
في حزبها إن المستشارة ميركل ستترشح لولاية رابعة. جاء ذلك على لسان المسؤول عن
لجنة العلاقات الخارجية في البرلمان الألماني نوربرت روتغن. "

"Despite the lack of official confirmation, including the intention to run
again, a senior leader of her party said that Chancellor Merkel will stand for
a fourth term. This came on the tongue in charge of the Foreign Relations
Committee in the German Parliament Norbert Rongn."

Of course, the translation is not perfect but good enough. However, I believe
that they could do better by working on their Arabic text-to-speech
synthesizer and having a toggle option for diacritics that would definitely
help them with the synthesizer as there are many words pronounced wrong or
actually very wrong that's disappointing.

All in all, great work by the people at Google Translate.

[1]:
[http://www.dw.com/ar/%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%8A-%D8%A8%D...](http://www.dw.com/ar/%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%8A-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%B2-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%AD%D8%B2%D8%A8-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%B4%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%B1%D9%83%D9%84-%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%AA%D8%B1%D8%B4%D8%AD-%D9%84%D9%88%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B9%D8%A9/a-36404882)

~~~
jbrazile
English to German still has room for improvement.

At first I was offended but then I realized he was just pulling my leg. He
smiled and said, "I'm just yanking your chain." She added, "Don't mind him,
he's always rattling someone's cage."

Zuerst war ich beleidigt, aber dann merkte ich, dass er gerade mein Bein zog.
Er lächelte und sagte: "Ich zerrle gerade deine Kette." Sie fügte hinzu:
"Kümmern Sie sich nicht um ihn, er ist immer rasseln jemandes Käfig."

~~~
pantalaimon
It honestly sounds like something Krautchan or /r/de would write
(Zangendeutsch)

------
demircancelebi
I just tested English to Turkish, works surprisingly well, congrats Google!
Wondering when Babelfish will be available :)

------
emodendroket
Welp, glad I abandoned my ambitions in Japanese translation to write software
instead.

~~~
luxpir
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.

But software's a good bet too ;)

~~~
emodendroket
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.

~~~
luxpir
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.

------
novalis78
German to English works amazingly well... I was able to fool it the other way
round though. Here some crazy German sentences and the English version:

"Das altbacken emotionale Muster einer zerstoerten Ehe aehnelt dem Neutrino-
sturm eines sterbenden Gasgiganten" -"The old-fashioned emotional pattern of a
ruined marriage resembles the neutrino storm of a dying gas giant"

(In the above I tried to confuse it using archaic words mixed with completely
disconnected topics in the same sentence while still being grammatically
correct.)

"Das verrueckte an der Sache ist der enorme Unterschied zwischen digitalem
Denkmuster und analogem Sachverstand" \- "The crazy thing about this is the
enormous difference between digital thought patterns and analogous expertise"

Beautiful! [Disclaimer: studied linguistics]

------
laacz
When I read something about google translate (related to Latvian or not),
there is a certain phrase I love testing - "Hard rock fan".

There were times when it was translated literally - "a fan, manufactured from
solid rock" (cieto iežu ventilators). Then for a brief moment it was
translated as originally intended. Now, however, it translates to nonsense
("hard rock ventilators"), which losely may be translated back to English as
"Hard rock fan", where "fan" refers to that thing which moves air around.

However, an article from Latvian news site was translated to English
unexpectedly good. Which was not the case for English to Latvian translation,
sadly. But it makes some kind of point if we consider English as lingua
franca.

~~~
usaphp
Well phrase "hard rock fan" depends on a context, in some context you might
actually mean ventilator.

~~~
laacz
That was my thought, but I could not think of any :)

------
malloryerik
So what does this mean for language learning?

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 ;)

~~~
pmyjavec
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.

~~~
malloryerik
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?

~~~
unclenoriega
It happens with pretty much every technology. Socrates said writing would make
people dumb because they wouldn't exercise their memory.

[http://wondermark.com/socrates-vs-writing/](http://wondermark.com/socrates-
vs-writing/)

~~~
pmyjavec
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.

[1]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494407...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494407000734)
[2] [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/fea...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/features/google-effect-is-technology-making-us-stupid-10391564.html)

~~~
unclenoriega
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.

------
jgable
(Very) Long term, it will be interesting to see what happens when everyone is
carrying Google Babelfish around with them.

~~~
DonaldFisk
Not so long ago there was AltaVista Babelfish, which has been now replaced by
Bing Translator. I don't know if they trademarked the name.

~~~
hulahoof
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.

~~~
Biganon
You don't get copyright for a device. You might get a patent though

------
egeozcan
I'm amazed with the improvement in Turkish. Here's an example:

[http://i.imgur.com/NQvJ6bK.png](http://i.imgur.com/NQvJ6bK.png)

Left side is human translation, right side is Google:

[http://i.imgur.com/bYJDHhs.png](http://i.imgur.com/bYJDHhs.png)

The loss of information is minimal, and mistakes are very tolerable. Funnily,
the biggest ones are already underlined by Chrome spell checker.

update: I'm trying it with my commit logs (English -> Turkish and German) and
the results are amazing.

~~~
afsina
One thing about Chrome spell checking; it uses a form of stem-ending
dictionary for Turkish and does not perform actual morphological analysis. So
sometimes legit words will be marked as mistakes. Such as the one in your
example "yuvarlamaktır"

~~~
egeozcan
Yes, indeed. Just a weird but funny coincidence in this case.

------
tmptmp
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.

~~~
xiaoma
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.

~~~
lacampbell
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.

------
paulftw
Stupid question: when they say 8 languages including Chinese - do they mean
Mandarin or Cantonese? Or is that the same thing (for them)?

~~~
bumblebeard
They mean Mandarin. There have been rumblings in the past that Cantonese
support might be coming though.

~~~
schoen
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!).

------
Hnrobert42
I'll be interested to see the effect on Vietnamese-English when it rolls out.
Currently, it's so bad as to be almost unusable.

~~~
wila
Same with Thai-English, curious to see if it is any better now.

~~~
atrilumen
Not implemented yet. "Eventually."

------
bluesilver07
I translated this line from the New York Times - "The dismissals followed the
abrupt firing on Friday of Gov. Chris Christie" to Tamil. It translated
"firing" as துப்பாக்கி சூடு (Gunfire). Maybe it needs to infer the contextual
meaning from the earlier word "dismissals"?

~~~
antaviana
English>Tamil is not one of the language pairs of the new neural engine.

------
sundvor
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.

~~~
50CNT
Just in case you care, it is "Es gibt mir Schadenfreude", and "Es macht mich
schadenfreudig".

~~~
sundvor
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.

~~~
50CNT
That's how I learned English. Hung around on IRC a lot.

------
sidcool
> With this update, Google Translate is improving more in a single leap than
> we’ve seen in the last ten years combined

Pretty bold claim

~~~
michael_h
_Google Translate_ is arguably improving substantially with this update. The
state of _machine translation in general_ has already been better than Google
Translate. The problem with the bleeding-edge systems is that they are not
well distributed, no thought has been given to UX/UI, and the people who
created them just want to finish their thesis and get out. Also, speed - the
systems that eke out another few extra percentage points on accuracy tend to
hoover up the CPU cycles, crushing their business case.

~~~
bonoboTP
> the people who created them just want to finish their thesis and get out

You mean it's not an enjoyable thing to work on such systems and at the first
opportunity they run away?

~~~
michael_h
It's enjoyable to work on them, but...there's a limit.

------
JoeAltmaier
I'm not a fan of translating the 'meaning' instead of the actual wording. You
lose idiom, phrasing, even the poetry. Its like I won't understand what they
said, so it gets dumbed down. Like talking to a child.

My pet peeve: translators that tell you 'what they meant' instead of what they
said.

~~~
luxpir
It's absolutely possible to retain idiom, phrasing and even the poetry of a
text, all while retaining meaning. Particularly if the source and target
languages are culturally and linguistically similar. In fact you have to, as
the translation has to retain the original meaning. The tradeoff is in not
losing the above.

But sometimes that's not necessary. A reference, guide or manual, for
instance. A contract. A patent. Records of legal proceedings.
Scientific/medical texts. Dozens/hundreds of examples where it's not
necessary.

Fiction, that's another matter, but it doesn't account for anywhere near the
majority of the world's $40bn annual spend on translation.

And if you like the original so much, you can always learn the language ;)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Well for instance, I was trying to find out what "itadakimasu" says (which
many Japanese persons say before eating food prepared for them). Its almost
impossible to get a literal translation from anybody (including Google
Translate, which says Let's Eat).

~~~
luxpir
Not sure if Google Translate is the best research tool for an archaic idiom...
Duckduckgo threw up this:

[https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/itadakimasu-
meaning/](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/itadakimasu-meaning/)

Thanks for the interesting read :)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
A good example - that link has eight (8!) different English translations for
the phrase's meaning. Surely the phrase is made up of words, and its possible
to tell us how those words translate individually!

If I break it up into 'ita daki masu' then Google Translate emits "I will
start with you." Again, no idea if that's even close.

~~~
luxpir
I'm tempted to think, forgive me if I'm wrong, but you may be looking at
language too mechanically. Not sure if I can explain what I mean in a 2 minute
HN comment, but I'll try: The word for word, literal translation, for which
you express your preference in the parent comment, rarely works to translate
meaning, particularly when it comes to idiom.

And I'm not talking about the grammar, but cultural references that can only
be similarly expressed in translation if no matching idiom exists. An
alternative strategy is to just use the original (potentially with an
explainer, under creative license) assuming the reader is aware that this is a
translation and the text is based in the source language's location/culture.

"It's raining cats and dogs" has an equivalent in most languages. "Lagom" in
Swedish doesn't. You could say it's similar to the "itadakimasu" concept of
'being grateful'. It is often translated as 'enough', but even that is
woefully lacking. "Itadakimasu" also falls under the _sorry, no specific
equivalent here_ banner since it is specific to JP culture.

What are you hoping to find from the individual words? The etymology of the
word is described in the 'Itadakimasu History' section, with references to
mountain tops, bowing, gratefulness. Are you looking for a single, one-size-
fits all equivalent word? Are you looking to understand it's history, or how
to use it? The article is pretty comprehensive. And let's bear in mind that we
may be over-analysing. Thousands of Japanese 5 year olds probably said
itadakimasu today without a thought.

------
baybal2
Wow, something that is actually useful came out of that neural network thing
at Google

------
nharada
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.

~~~
gwern
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.

------
amelius
So, what kind of algorithms are they using? References to literature welcome.

~~~
dyoo1979
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144](https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144), as well
as the References section at the bottom of:
[https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-
for...](https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-
machine.html)

------
batmansmk
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.

~~~
tener
Not necessarily: languages are ambigous by nature.

------
woodruffw
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.

------
starbucksswa
Turkish-English one is nearly perfect. Well done Google

------
seesomesense
I am trying to learn Finnish and I have found that the colloquial, literary
and poetic registers of Finnish are poorly translated.

------
vumgl
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"

~~~
cperciva
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".

~~~
dougfelt
"...as caused it."

------
chappi42
Works great. Thank you Google!

~~~
pmyjavec
You're welcome, chappi42

------
dfgonzalez
Am I the only one surprised, and disgusted, about the .google TLD?

~~~
piyush_soni
Wow. I didn't even notice it didn't have a .com at the end of "blog.google". I
have no idea what's so 'disgusting' about it though.

~~~
cooper12
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.

~~~
trentmb
> Would Google allow me to register fuck.google or anything that could damage
> their brand? I highly doubt it.

It's not like they'd let you register fuck.google.com either.

~~~
cooper12
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]

[0]:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20060114103656/http://www.fuckmi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060114103656/http://www.fuckmicrosoft.com/)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN#.sucks_domain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN#.sucks_domain)

