

Does Google Have A Secret “Translate” Service? - Houshalter
http://searchengineland.com/secret-google-translate-service-relevant-search-marketers-182434

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lnanek2
The Google Play app translation he mentions isn't done automatically. Look at
the announcement: > [http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/11/app-
translati...](http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/11/app-translation-
service-now-available.html)

"purchase professional app translations through the Google Play Developer
Console" "select a professional translation vendor"

That said, translation vendors tend to just translate automatically first and
then have a human clean it up.

~~~
mcintyre1994
I think he was referring to the descriptions in the Play (and Chrome) stores,
which are now automatically translated if translations aren't provided by the
developer: [https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-
developer/answ...](https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-
developer/answer/3125566?hl=en)

~~~
babuskov
Those translations are rather bad, at least for languages I use. It appears to
use the same algorithm as the free translate service.

Developers have option to buy professional translation inside Play Store, and
some probably do it for mainstream languages. I'm not sure if you can tell if
developer has used it (except by judging the quality of translation)

~~~
mcintyre1994
From the link I posted, "There will be a note above the translation explaining
that the translation has been done automatically, and an option to return to
the default language." \- so presumably if that's not present it was
professionally translated.

~~~
babuskov
Looks like I missed that one. Thanks.

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Kudos
Consider also that Google has context when they translate for their stores,
but they can only infer context from the content of translations on Google
Translate.

~~~
bri3d
I had the same thought: it's clear when translating a game description that
the name of the game is a noun in whichever gender is appropriate for proper
names of software in the target language.

Has anyone done any more widespread analysis of "auto"-translated Play Store
descriptions versus those available through Google's public translate service?
It would be interesting to see how much is contextual and how much suggests a
different set of rules, training data, or algorithm.

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bitL
I always assumed Google has two kinds of translations - the online we know
from the web, which is fast though simple, and an offline, that is much more
realistic but slow. Other companies achieved very good offline translations
(often by employing professional translations that translated sentences
between languages and building databases for automated translation) and I see
no reason why Google wouldn't be able to create/license a similar one.

~~~
ma2rten
All machine translation is based on professional sentence-by-sentence
translations.

~~~
lkbm
Except Google Translate, which is just a statistical analysis of a huge
corpus.

~~~
Mvandenbergh
Yes, of texts available in multiple languages. Which were originally
translated by humans.

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jzwinck
The article says Yiddish is "spoken mainly by the Jewish ultra-orthodox
community that refrains from using computers." Well that's half true:
(ultra-)orthodox Jews are a major part of the Yiddish speaking world, but the
idea that they do not use computers is ridiculous. I wonder where this idea
comes from...you can even Google it to learn that some rabbis advocate for
their members to censor their internet access, which implies they do have
computers. They even post on YouTube.

~~~
CPLX
Not only do Orthodox Jews have computers, they apparently have enough of them
to sell me my last 5 laptops and desktops. (source B&H Photo)

~~~
hnriot
the only web site that has open hours. I find that amazing that half the time
I look for something there the web store is closed for some Jewish holiday -
of which there are many.

~~~
pmjordan
Not the only one. If you access them from a German IP address, most game
download services will only let you buy games that are rated 18+ in Germany
between 10pm and 6am CET/CEST or some such time range. (I found this out
because I have a VPN tunnel that terminates in Germany)

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franze
simple explantation: machine learning.

the public google translate tool is trained on data from the internet (and
google books), and its intended use is for translating stuff that you found
online (on the open web)

google play store translation are trained on data from ... tada ... google
play store (and probably editorial translations), it's intended use is for
translating descriptions on the play store.

using the play store translation logic on other texts will probably lead to
inferior results.

not working for google, just my 2 speculative cents

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Buge
I wonder if the translation bots could make an app, and repeatedly change its
description and translate it.

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chacham15
I remember learning in my machine learning class that translation is a solved
problem. However, the reason it appears to be bad is because it is
computationally expensive. There are different levels of translation, each of
which are increasingly more difficult to compute. There is word for word
translation. As you can imagine, this is the lowest level, easy to compute,
but overall has poor quality. First, word for word translation, then syntax
translation, semantic translation, and finally interligual semantic
translation. I took that class a while ago, so forgive me if I'm not 100%
accurate, but that is generally the issue: the higher level translation you
want, the more expensive the computation.

~~~
philh
I don't think translation is even a solved problem for a human fluent in both
languages. The ideal is to write what the original author would have written,
if they were writing fluently in the target language. Sometimes that means
they would have written something that doesn't have the same literal meaning.
If a pun doesn't work in the target language, a fluent writer would have used
a different pun, but how do you know which?

Even if you want to preserve literal meaning, an example that comes to mind,
but which I can't quickly source: IIRC the original _Metroid_ manual, in
Japanese, referred to Samus with a gender-neutral pronoun. In English, you
basically can't do that without calling attention to it. 'They' and 'he/she'
are unusual enough to read awkwardly; 'it' and 'he' would be incorrect; and
'she' would give away the twist. Whatever you choose, you're losing something,
and it's a judgment call as to what.

~~~
whiddershins
I believe that technically, in English, "he" is the correct gender neutral
pronoun. It just feels wrong so people commonly try to find other options.

~~~
_delirium
It's been surprisingly fluid over the history of English. One interesting bit
to read about is the history of "singular they", i.e. the use of "they" in
sentences such as "if a person wishes to gain access, they must enter the
code". This was fairly common in pre-19th-century English, then fell out of
favor in the 19th and early 20th centuries as grammarians considered it
incorrect ("they" was deemed solely a plural pronoun), and now it's making a
comeback as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. The construction "he or she"
also has usage going back centuries, as a different approach to that. And as
you note, the use of "he" as a stand-in pronoun is also traditional, but
falling a bit out of favor lately. Overall I don't think there is one correct
answer for how English deals with that situation; it varies across writers and
eras.

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brisance
Duolingo's translation bot seems to do a much better translation job than
Google's "public" tool, at least for Spanish.

