
Can Google Help Translate a Classic Novel? - lermontov
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/71273-google-translating-a-classic-novel.html
======
danso
The more I think about the difficulties of translation, the more I think that
"Darmok" of Star Trek: TNG season 5, is the rule rather than the exception.
Not only is it difficult to replicate the literal meaning of individual words
and the structure of phrases, but it seems inextricably hard to replicate the
sentiment and cultural context of words (nevermind idioms).

The Olympics recently reminded me of this, when news orgs reported that
Brazillians had a colloquial word -- jeitinho -- that could be roughly
translated as "MacGyver-ism" [0]. But even _that_ rough translation needs a
translation for all native English speakers who were born in America after the
90s.

Side note: The phrase "star-crossed lovers" is something that comes to mind
that would be hard to translate. I threw it into Google Translate [1] and got
"desventurados amantes", which I guess means "wretched lovers" (when I threw
"desventurados" back into Spanish to English). Maybe a little gets lost in the
translation, but at least Google Translate didn't return whatever the literal
translation for "star" and "crossed" are.

[0] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-05/rio-
olympi...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-05/rio-olympic-
ceremony-marks-festive-showing-of-brazil-cash-crunch)

[1] [https://translate.google.com/#auto/es/star-
crossed%20lovers](https://translate.google.com/#auto/es/star-crossed%20lovers)

~~~
CWuestefeld
_The article says "Another unvarying element of the Google Translate versions
is the word "boat" for barco, a perfectly correct rendering of a simple
Spanish noun. But in English, we have the expression, "When my ship comes in,"
... Translating barco as "ship" brings an echo of that deep history of longing
into our first, fleeting image of the narrator, Don Diego de Zama, who lives
in the hope of a ship that will come to save him."_

This sounds rather grandiloquent to me.

But more significantly, my father was the captain of a ship. One of his pet
peeves was people mistakenly interchanging the words "boat" and "ship". The
two terms are not equivalent (boat being a small vessel, and ship being a
large vessel that might even be expected to carry a boat of its own, viz, a
lifeboat). If he heard that human translator taking liberties with his
nautical vocabulary, he'd have a cow.

So do we want Google to translate more accurately, or do we want it to strive
for a literary flair?

~~~
ludamad
I'll be underwhelmed until translation software provides configuration for
core assumptions

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wccrawford
Spoiler: No.

A better title would have been, "How Google fails at translations". The piece
is actually interesting to read if you're into either language translations or
how Google does stuff that seems magical, but the clickbait headline isn't
doing it any favors.

~~~
joe_the_user
Hmm,

So, the article notes that the Google translate of a challenging but not
incomprehensible Spanish phrase hasn't improved in the four years the
translator tested. I personally haven't noticed Facebook translate improve in
any fashion over a similar period.

Yet I had heard of translation as one of the triumphs of recurrent neural
networks. It may well be that such translations are doing better on some
metric in some competitions yet that such formal improvements aren't palpable
to humans yet. I have read previously things about translation now no longer
needing language experts - which seems to say that perhaps automatic
translation hasn't improved but merely gotten cheaper.

While this raises the "is this deep learning stuff hype?", I think AlphaGo
shows that _some_ deep learning stuff is pretty amazing. One might argue also
that ConvNets have had the unambiguous triumphs which RNNs' triumph is a bit
more ambiguous.

I'd be curious how folks who actually create this this technology would view
progress of this sort.

~~~
mattkrause
One scary thing I've noticed is that Google Translate has a new failure mode.
While it used to return obviously incomprehensible gibberish when things went
off the rails, it now sometimes returns something plausible but subtly
incorrect.

For example, it silently dropped the negation in a French -> English
translation. Unfortunately, I can't remember the exact phrase but it was so
semantically implausible--something like "regardless, we will be liable for
any damages" that I went back and looked at the source text. It also sometimes
replaces pronouns with oddly specific nouns: "He does X --> John does X" I
assume these are both reflections of oddities in the training data.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Reminds me of the photocopier that started changing numbers in documents it
copied.

[http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-
workcentres_...](http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-
workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning)

~~~
mattkrause
Wow. That must have been absolutely maddening to discover.

------
glibgil
> Salí de la ciudad, ribera abajo, al encuentro solitario del barco que
> aguardaba, sin saber cuándo vendría.

> I left the city and made my way downriver alone, to meet the ship I awaited
> without knowing when it would come.

The human translation seems a little wrong to me.

I'll argue for the following:

 _I left the city, downstream, to the solitary meeting of the ship I awaited,
not knowing when it would arrive._

"encuentro" seems to be a noun here, therefore "meeting". "solitario" is an
adjective and describes the "meeting", not the narrator's manner of leaving.

~~~
tetraodonpuffer
I agree your translation is a lot closer to the original text, the original
for example talks about a 'solitary meeting' with the ship, it does not say
like in the translators' that the character got there alone, they could have
gotten there with others and left them to wait for the boat alone for all the
reader knows.

As much as the sentence in the article is quite nice, it seems more of a
reinterpretation of the original compared to an exact translation like yours.

------
rabboRubble
I find Google Translate good at translating sentence fragments but generally
not full sentences. Also, any Google Translate Japanese to English translation
is near jibberish.

~~~
panglott
J>E is the worst, Spanish is also not great. Google Translate is especially
bad in places where the speakers will assume their interlocutors will infer
significant amounts of information from context—because Google Translate has
not actual knowledge of the context.

~~~
yongjik
Japanese->English can't be "the worst", because I've seen Korean websites
telling this one weird trick for better quality: "Translate Korean to Japanese
first and then translate that to English, and the result is better than direct
translation!"

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

When I tried, it was more of a hit and miss, though.

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vlunkr
This is a perfect lesson in understanding the difference between computer and
human intelligence. Google "knows" more languages than any human, and how to
translate most words between languages, but when it comes to 1) parsing the
meaning of the sentence and 2) bringing that into another language, it's
generally pretty bad. It's no match for a person who speaks both languages
adequately.

EDIT: It's the type of thing that makes me not fear the threat of AI. Seems
like we are still pretty far from HAL. Missed his 2001 launch window.

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akeck
Yes.... ish? I've done the following for French -> English on an essay: 1)
Google translate all the single sentences or sentence fragments. Use an online
dictionary when the answer looks odd. 2) Re-mangle the machine translated
blocks into decent English. It mostly worked. Doing this process on a novel
would hurt. ;-)

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Yes, but manual translation of a novel would also hurt ;-)

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mturmon
What a beautiful sentence - and challenging.

