Oh yeah, I noticed that my last time abroad. It was indeed freaky.
This sounds like an epic trolling opportunity if someone could hack the app and make it translate everything to be as misleading and/or offensive as possible.
One could imagine world war breaking out because the UN decides to replace human translators with the app and then it gets hacked (by Russian trolls, of course).
Hacking apps is for assholes. The trick is to use language so filled with idiomatic expressions, puns, and double entendre that any body relying on computer translation will quickly come to grief.
I need to figure out how to use this app super well when I go to China in April. Very happy to hear it works offline.
The future is fun! ... The future is fair! ... You may already have won! ... You may already be there!
I can't actually vouch for that - I was online the whole time - but it seemed like it was designed for that.
The future's comin', and there's no place to hide!
Counter program it with the nem-shub of Enki.
Google Translate saved my ass 7 years ago when I got lost in a hospital in Chile (I was there to observe a procedure employing my company's device). Obviously it was just text to text at the time, but being able to type "I am lost. Please help me find the endovascular surgery suite" in and handing the translated version to people along the way was really helpful.
I hope you didn't take your pseud from the name of the device sold by your company.
Now I kind of want to point a phone running the app at the screen of another phone running the app to see how well it translates back.
"The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."
OTOH, I understand that that thing where the Norwegians accidentally ordered 150k eggs was a Google Translate fail? That seems like exactly the easiest thing to get right.
The trick is to use language so filled with idiomatic expressions, puns, and double entendre that any body relying on computer translation will quickly come to grief.
This reminds me of the time I used Google Translate on something written by Derrida.
This a test, Walker? You checkin if we been slack?
Google translate super sucks for Chinese (sorry J, Robot). I mean, it will probably do well enough for "where's the bathroom?" or "I want the beef noodles" type stuff, though it's remarkably bad at some simple stuff too. My guess is it's because they're blocked from gathering data on Chinese internet use, so they're getting it all from HK/Taiwan.
My husband used the app in Prague, and it worked alright on Czech except it had very strange opinions about Slovak and Hungarian (when set to the Czech language).
I haven't seen a good cite for what got mis-translated, but there's a lot of room for mistakes. Decimal separators can go in different places, grouping in Korean numbers is by ten-thousands instead of thousands, etc.
What, you just put the comma in the right place to show thirteen lakh crore, what's the big deal.
17
Large numbers are really hard in Chinese, for that reason. You have anything above ten thousand measured in groupings of ten thousands, until you get to 100 million. So China's population is 14 hundred million, and the population of the district I lived in was about 12 tens of thousands. It's really easy to mess up by a decimal place, though with writing out the full number you'd think you'd get it right.
Spreadsheets from Germany are annoying with the commas and periods in the wrong places.
I just introduced my mum to the live translation feature the other week. It's the first time I've managed to convince her that any cellular phone technology more modern than a feature phone might be useful.
I can't actually vouch for that - I was online the whole time - but it seemed like it was designed for that.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the live translation only works offline, in that you have to download the language dictionary first.
The explanations on the Norwegian egg thing are scant - some of the articles say Google Translate couldn't be a full explanation and that it might have been a "typo".
One idea I have that accommodates cultural, linguistic, and internetical differences: it could have been a textbox for bulk-order of eggs, where the box was followed by "0000", which would have made sense in Korea since they do count higher numbers in 만 (= 万 for Chinese/Japanese readers), and someone used to thousands could have just registered it as indicating three zeroes instead of four.
But they could also have just literally typed an extra zero.
Actually, that probably doesn't work, because they got 15,000 eggs, which would be 1.5万.
I say live it or live with it.
Sure, understanding today's complex world of the Future
is a little like having bees live in your head.
I really just wanted it for "where's the bathroom?" type questions. I should hopefully have a Chinese grad student showing me around most of the time, but it's good to be prepared.
It's an authoritarian state. You want to be sure you don't void where prohibited.
Sure, understanding today's complex world of the Future
is a little like having bees live in your head.
16: My hovercraft is full of eels!
I used the live picture translation last year to help me get through a language class that was one level too high for what I knew at the time, but that was my only option due to scheduling. And they had this feature on Google glass several years ago, where you could look at something and the eyepiece would project the overlaid translation as AR. The newest thing is live audio translation with Google earbuds, a la Babelfish (which I think we discussed here last year when it was announced)- I don't have an Android phone or the earbuds so I haven't tried it, but supposedly it's good enough for a slow but real-time conversation. In other words, the future is already the past, and between the Babelfish and the fact that a moron was elected president by accident, it seems like the future is written by Douglas Adams.
The Google scan feature is very cool (though not new) but as a general translator for speaking and writing Spanish English, I found Easy Language Translator worked better than Google or Microsoft.
Google Translate is notoriously dreadful on Irish ("Gaelic") - basic functionality from same to English most of the time but badly wrong on the reverse. Not that it has stopped stupid people from using it to create translated signs. Here's one that seems to be translating "milkshakes" as "disadvantages" (only one of other other items has been translated at all).
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQNoJKRX4AEKyoZ.jpg
Worse again are the badly translated tattoos.
Here's one that seems to be translating "milkshakes" as "disadvantages"
MY DISADVANTAGES BRING ALL THE BOYS TO THE YARD, SO THEY DO.
Sometimes the names of foods are kept in the language of the place where the food was developed. At least for iconic foods like crepes and slush puppies.
"Your disadvantage, I drink it up" works about as well as the original line.
32: Some of the weirder results from Google Translate for minor languages may even be deliberate sabotage. There's a little "Suggest an edit" button in the results box, and professional translators have long joked that we should be taking every opportunity to fuck it up before it fucks up our livelihoods. (Which is unlikely at the moment - the new neural network version is far better for Japanese to English than the previous corpus-based version was, but is still no good for anything more than conveying basic meaning, and often not even that.) In one of the most famous edits, Google Translate used to return "I'm using your Facebook" in Japanese when you input "I hate you" in English, but sadly that got fixed very quickly.
Fixed so that you have to input "I hate you, but in a passive-aggressive way"?
In Japanese, that's all one word.
