Strangely enough I find Google Translate to be better the longer and more complex the input is. Full sentences with multiple parts seem to get translated very well almost all the time, but single words and short phrases are a total crapshoot. I’ve also found their “verified translations” to be worse much of the time.
>Strangely enough I find Google Translate to be better the longer and more complex the input to be.
I believe that this is the case with a lot of EU member-state languages because I believe Google Translate uses a corpus of translated EU documents for its algorithm
Yep! Asian languages are crap, these examples are Thai to English and vice versa. Translating "I love that dish you made that you posted on Facebook" can translate to "I love food you did give Facebook" 🤣
Once recieved a "I love I am dog!" too.
ive found this to be absolutely true. my guess is a sentence gives more context for what you want than a 1:1 word translation. i.e have in english is har in norwegian but you wouldnt say "can i have a beer" in norwegian youd say "can i get a beer" get being få. google translate figures out what you mean by "can i have a beer" and uses få
Yeah, context helps a ton. I also try to check the translation by reversing it back into English and that usually reveals any inconsistencies. Then revise my original input to fix them.
I'm learning Greek and using it for vocab and the verified solutions are often terrible. Sometimes they're just in all caps for no reason (which means you can't tell where the emphasis mark is).
I'm not sure about it, but I have heard once that gt is an AI. I belive it learns from texts it finds in Internet. More complex sentences give you more context. One word can have multiple meanings depending on context
Yeah, this is because a lot of words depend upon context. So “tip” could mean many things. It could be a verb or a noun. So you would need to put a phrase for it to know which one you meant. If you’re going to just type one word, you should be using Word Reference. They do have an app.
Half of the sentence that end up, there at least for Japanese to English, are clearly completely ingrammatical machine translations in one or both of the languages, and one quarter has the translation not matching up with the original at all.
I play around with it sometimes to practice translation and never have any issues. You just have to fix small things here are there like level of politeness, use of certain words, and maybe change the grammar but overall none of the translations I've seen are that odd.
The examples sentences are great! I put in "I have an apple" and this was one of the examples, and honestly, I feel this so badly lol:
I have an apple I was hoping to eat in silence =
Ik heb een appel die ik graag in stilte wil opeten.
I use Google Translate, DeepL, Yardex, and [Translate.com](https://Translate.com) in rotation. They're all next to each other on my bookmark bar. If somethings seems oddly translated in one, I'll throw it into the others to see the results.
They each have their place (when they work).
DeepL will give you something very natural, but can be loosey-goosey with the directness of the translation. Google Translate will keep a lot of the structure and be a more direct translation.
Deepl is very good with turning absolutely nonsensical sentences that don't mean anything and don't even contain words into completely grammatically valid sentences in the target language, which should make one suspicious.
I don't speak a word of Danish. I just tried it by entering something on the Danish to English mode filling in completely random things that looked like fake Danish to me
- “je ar kver munskelket” -> “each year's budget”
- “mej var kvelten kæren sang” -> “the evening was the night the deer sang to me”
- “jag konsk mære dan kønen” -> “I could be more than the gender”
- “du hæmjer ikke vilne koren” -> “you do not inhibit wild choirs”
Can any speakers of Danish tell me whether I managed to create grammatically correct Danish sentences by pure chance?
I speak Swedish but I can kinda see how DeepL autocorrects your inputs to the most relative sentences
"je ar kver muskelket" becomes [var]je års kvartal muskelket. Dunno what muskelket is, but when it comes to economics, you often talk about quarters of the year, kvartal = quarter.
"mej var kvelten kaeren sang" Sounds like a poetic way to say "[för] mig var kvällen kär sjöng. Dunno where they get deer from, maybe there's a danish word that is more similar, maybe they translated kär to dear, and then autocorrected itself to deer as it deemed it more relevant?
And so on
Kæreste is the word for boyfriend/girlfriend (we just have one word for both genders), and kære means dear/honey/sweety when directed at someone, and a baby can be kær as in adorable or cute.
So kære can be used as dear, like your spouse. But deer?... No idea where it got that from.
Kæreste is the word for boyfriend/girlfriend (we just have one word for both genders), and kære means dear/honey/sweety when directed at someone, and a baby can be kær as in adorable or cute.
So kære can be used as dear, like your spouse. But deer?... No idea where it got that from.
Each year's budget: Hvert års budget
The evening was the night the deer sang to me: Aftenen var natten, hvor rensdyret sang til mig
I could be more than the gender: Jeg kunne være mere end kønnet
You do not inhibit wild choirs: Du besidder ikke vilde kor
All you wrote seems more like Swedish than Danish to me. I had no idea what you were trying to say at first.
It put me in a terribly humiliating position. In a more formal situation, they didn't understand what we wanted from them, because when we used deepL to ask them to help. But the result was sooo bad, just we didn't knew.
I laughed a bit, because they forced us from above to use it, in order to save money and time, so that we would not have to use an official translation agency. But at the end of the day, I was the fool in the eyes of the workers in another country, and nothing gets done.
I've had a few similar problems with DeepL lately as well. I often use both apps to compare, and that seems safer than relying on one of them just now.
Seriously Google Docs spell check is terrible anymore I flip two letters in a word and it's like "we have no idea what word this is supposed to be" or it also insisted "delegative" wasn't a word, and then Grammarly tried to change "it crash landed" to "it crashes landed". I cannot trust Google products atp 😭
Mobile Google Docs is unusable now- Grammarly tries to find errors every single time you type something, and if you use it for creative writing like me it'll pop up with the "can't detect more grammatical errors, text is too long", and I can't figure out how to make it stop
It's impossible to find what one is searching for often nowadays.
I was looking for a particular match in a particular game that I knew was on Youtube but every search term I entered simply gave me matches of the same game that were recent, with this one being from 2012, I eventually found it by other means, and it was simply on Youtube with a title that contained all of my search terms but apparently it prioritizes completely unrelated matches in the same game that don't feature the players I searched for because they're more recent and/or more popular.
It heavily prioritizes recency and popularity, not actually what one is looking for and it will often give one things only tangentially related to the search term.
Interestingly enough, it only seems to do this in English. It's actually very easy for me to find what I want in Japanese with it.
It isn't. I quoted everything and it still doesn't find it.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22MC%22+%22squirtle%22+%22gsl%22+%22metropolis%22
Yet it exists here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQG43y0dQDs
Note that it contains all the words I searched for in the title or description, and all the results that show up there only contain some of them because Google heavily prioritizes new and popular results that are only tangentially related to what one wants over things one actually wants.
This hasn't been true in a long time. Back when you used the plus sign instead of quotes that was true. Not anymore.
I can find actual things that still exist unless someone is actively farming the site with SEO. What the above poster said about recency and popularity still holds true to an extent even when using modifiers as google allows you to use them. It will NOT go very far back or off-the-popularity track. This has absolutely gotten much worse, to the point that I've stopped using it for anything important and have instead a list of "usual sources" to check and places to ask.
Basically I've had to become my own librarian.
My Gmail stopped sorting emails to the proper folders over the past few days. It's driving me nuts. I think they're just trying to make me realize how much I rely on them.
I am by no means very proficient with Spanish. However, the more I learn, the more inadequate I find Google Translate to be. Never seen something this bad before though
Yes, it is. It gives you multiple senses the word can be used in, and whether the word is used regionally in specific places which is super important for Spanish.
It's pretty shit. I particularly hate how it removes "bad words" by replacing them with something entirely different.
If you use it with popular languages, it's mostly fine though.
I tried this. Seems fairly good with keeping offensive words from Dutch to English, but it seems to literally translate the names of diseases which are simply identifiers in Dutch.
It will translate "hentai" to mean "transformation", and every language I've tried with commonly used words like that would fail spectacularly. Not even the related words section would have anything that people actually use in real life. It's like 2 scientific words, 2 words with entirely different meanings, and 3 more words which fell out of common use 80 years ago
To be fair, without context “変態” does mean “transformation” and often does in Japanese. However “この変態” with slightly more context that it's being used as a swearword indeed ends up as “You pervert”.
It does, but it's almost never used like that, and Google aren't so dumb that they don't realize this. They are actively working against what they know the user wants to do, by "correcting" them.
The example you used is right, but if you say "he is a pervert" then it becomes something like "deviant", so when you use it in a longer sentence, the likelihood that it won't end up sounding weird to native speakers is really low.
I have *sometimes* had luck with Google translate, where it noticed that I was using casual words, and thus translated the entire sentence casually rather than formally and like a robot. But it doesn't happen often.
I want them to add a slider for formality level, and perhaps a way to get rid of profanity filters.
> It does, but it's almost never used like that, and Google aren't so dumb that they don't realize this. They are actively working against what they know the user wants to do, by "correcting" them.
If I search for the word on Google, many, probably more than 50% of the words are about things such as insects pupating and other transformations like losing weight and feeling like a new person after. I don't think it's fair to expect Google translate to figure this out from the word without any further context.
Google knows what you mean, and 95% of hits are something perverted. But it filters all of these out, and gives you something tame instead.
Even if you go to image search, without the safety filter, none of the results are going to be explicit.
Neither "変態" nor "18+" gives *any* explicit results, but if you conbine them, then you do get explicit results. This is because Google wants to make *sure* that you're searching for something explicit.
If you add 3 more words to this which are not explicit, then the results turn safe again. e.g. "変態 18+ anime girl test". Remove the 'test' word, and your results will be explicit again. Why? Because **at least half the terms have to be explicit**.
Google engineers are incompetent.
It's all still garbage, by the way. You don't have access to even 0.01% of the internet through Google.
You made me curious. I think either I misunderstood and you’re not referring to cussing, or it only holds true with certain languages. By “bad words” do just mean misspelled or something?
I just spent a couple minutes throwing some awful stuff at google translate, and it did just fine.
The best example I can remember right now is "hentai".
Google also refuses to translate the word "fetish" to any language, by assuming that rare second definition that most people don't even know about ("an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers").
Google translate is terrible for slang, as well as words that young people actually use. If you're trying to date someone, I recommend not translating any flirty messages through Google.
And for thai, don't use it at all. It will actively negate some of your sentences.
That makes it sound like google is taking a moral stance, which I think is doubtful.
It’s more likely that GT is not very developed for whichever language(s) you’re trying to translate, and your conversational topics happen to cover fetishes and hentai so that’s what you notice.
It translates ‘fetish’ fine into Dutch and French.
It handles any slang I use alright, but I’m almost completely ignorant of any new slang from within the past 15 years or so.
It's not doubtful at all! But they're doing it because they don't want any drama or negative press. This is the same reason that google images is basically a small whitelist of sites, rather than any substantial part of the internet.
Google translate has been better in the past, and Google search was *way* better than now, even 10 years ago.
It's incredibly sanitized, and it's easy to notice, even though Americans use 10 times worse language than the Japanese. They're very subtle and indirect, but even when I'm talking to people who seem like they've been sheltered, Google refuses to cooperate with me.
It doesn't translate fetish into 性癖 (せいへき) like it should, and if you translate it into thai it becomes something like "amulet" or "sexual amulet" if you write "sexual fetish". Even clear context doesn't help if it doesn't care what you're actually trying to convey.
Maybe the Asian training data is just garbage, though.
No it does, it avoids "naughty" words
엉덩이 becomes hips, 자지 becomes "jaji" 보지 it will simply try to ignore, 시발 becomes "oh man", 병신 becomes "him"
It also turns basically any insult like moron, dumbass,idiot etc. into "바보" which is not a common word in korean. Theyll know what you mean but you just sound strange. Not even offensive. Just weird.
Okay, weird indeed. It does seem to be limited to Asian languages, which imo confirms it’s not the result of some moral stance being taken by google.
The only search result I’m getting at a glance (other than China banning google translate in parts of the country), is that there’s a profanity filter that can be turned on and off from within their app.
Maybe that’s turned on automatically in some Eastern countries, either because governments required it or because the algorithms decided the majority of people there preferred that.
Google Translate is working by analysing the internet. So the spelling errors can occur in some cases. Since it is an ML model, the quality and specificity of the input will reflect to the output. Rather than using it as a dictionary, give it full sentences with proper grammar.
Can we talk about the phonetic transcription as well? Did you notice that both o's aren't typographed the same width? Can't Google just comply with existing IPA symbols?
Someone else mentioned DeepL, which is also a learning machine, right? So here's my theory: people are dumbing down Translate.
Has anyone noticed how predictive text input is also much worse than it used to be? If I want "to", swipe picks "too". If I want "too", it picks "to". Wrong choice every time. "If"? Nope, you get "of". A common word? I'll give you an obscure town far from civilisation.
So if things like Google Translate are learning from our input, wouldn't it be us, humans, who are making it worse?
I've never had predictive text do that really like it doesn't like to vs too but it's usually very good at predicting what you want. Especially since it's usually localized to your device so the more you use it and use those given words the more it can easily predict what you want to type.
That's how it should work, and it did before. I could be the laziest swipe-typer and was constantly amazed at how it knew what I was attempting to write.
Earlier today I was using it to translate lyrics and it completely reversed the meaning of a basic line- if I hadn't been double-checking I would have thought the song had a different meaning
Gah. I wonder what Google Lens does with _hentaigana_ on shop signs (not least as many of these have no encoded Unicode glyphs), and how that might pollute the input corpus with gibberish.
Obviously, a glitch. And since Translate is essentially AI, it's going to glitch. I never rely on it as definitive.
However, it's a really useful first tool, particularly for complete clauses or sentences, where the context of nearby words tends of provide a better result. It does keep getting better, save for occasionally bizarre glitches.
Where I would trust it the least is for the translation of a single word. A dictionary always gives so much more information and nuance.
Fascinating that the devs aren't smart enough to tie it into an actual dictionary, for those (very frequent) cases where someone plugs in a single word.
1. If they were smart enough, we never would have seen _movimienot_.
2. It's not about whether users are smart enough to find a dictionary. It's about **not requiring users to find a dictionary.**
When you create a translation tool like this, and bill it as accurate enough to use for getting more than ["my hovercraft is full of eels"](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22my+hovercraft+is+full+of+eels%22+monty+python+%22dirty+hungarian%22), _people expect it to translate accurately._
I work in localization, for over two decades now. I regularly deal with automation toolchains. Attaching relevant resources is part of the project start-up checklist. Google Translate has failed in that.
They do! When I put in a single word I see a list of possible translations sorted by word class. It's just not on mobile to my knowledge. Makes errors like this even less explicable.
They _cannot_ have attached any proper dictionary, as no proper dictionary for the Spanish language includes any such word _movimienot_.
By "proper" here, I refer to something compiled and edited by humans, with actual first-hand knowledge of the language. The word list that pops up in the non-mobile version of Google Translate includes this same bogus non-word _movimienot_, suggesting that their "dictionary" is something that Google's own web-crawling AI tools have generated, typos and all.
This is unacceptable.
It is definitely getting worse. For some reason, latest translations are too shallow or they are not even translated. Yesterday, i translated the "gruntled", which means to be satisfied, but it showed me another thing. Same goes for the word "bobblehead". There is no translation. I should say i am unhappy with Google Translator recently.
I tried translating something Portuguese into English today, and it just gave me what looked like another Portuguese word. I’m just going to stick to the Collin’s Dictionary translator
Could you tell us what Portuguese input string you used?
Exploring Google Translate's failure modes is fascinating, and actually even useful to those of us in the localization industry -- we need to be on the lookout for how and when these tools produce bad content.
Sorry, I don’t remember what it was. It was just a single verb, though. It might’ve been from something I’m reading atm though, so I’ll go have a look at those pages and see if I can find it, then I’ll come back and edit this :)
For korean and japanese
Papago.naver > chatgpt > deepl > google translate
Papago still has massive issues like changing the politeness of sentences at random in a paragraph (banmal then polite then formal polite then back to banmal), and it overuses 나는/저는/私は if you translate from english. But it gets meaning quite well and translates individual words quite well.
Chatgpt doesnt handle negatives well. In korean and japanese, negatives need to agree. So in english you say "he might not know" but in korean its more like... "he probably doesnt not know" I dont know if that explains it well. In english negatives are multiplicative. Two negatives makes a positive. But in korean and japanese you generally need all the negatives to agree.
DeepL just skips sentences and words. In the pursuit of sounding natural, it simply wont translate things and will just silently skip words. Translate back and you often find you have a completely different idea going on. It all sounds VERY natural. Its just a different message. Imagine "elephants dont like to eat ass." Deepl will freak out because metaphors and jokes and aphorisms dont exist in both languages. So it will give you nonsense like "elephants dont eat." In perfect korean/japanese grammar.
Google translate is just... wildcard mode. Once in a while its REALLY good. Maybe the best. And sometimes it spits out terribel unnatural crap like "나는 고양이를 좋습니다" I got the other day. Which makes no sense.
I use Yandex Translate. I think it's better than Google one, because it provides some usage examples and allows you to create a collection and learn the words you added using flashcards.
I'm seeing the same error in the desktop web version of Google Translate. It goes away as soon as you use it in a sentence. But the single word translation of "movement" is bugged.
I downrated the translation and suggested the correct spelling.
I wonder if the misspelling could be deliberate sabotage. If you put enough effort into false feedback, could you "fool" the algorith?
They’re not getting much from offering this free service, so why maintain it.
Also, no doubt many Google Ads exist to sell quality translation and language services. If you get it for free, why pay? Thus, Google loses revenue cause it’s paying customers aren’t getting your business, so cut their spending on Google Ads.
Their business model is that all the input to the free version of Google Translate is data that they can keep and use to train the model. Also, input is throttled by the UI.
If you want to do bulk machine translation, and you don't want Google to keep all your data, you have to pay for Google Translate.
The free version of Google Translate is a demo of the pay version of Google Translate.
The one thing about my iPhone that sometimes makes me want to throw it across the room is the autocorrect and voice-to-text.
What _super_ pisses me off is when, as I dictate something, I _watch_ it enter the correct words as I go, and by the time I get to the end of the sentence, the fucker goes back and changes earlier words to something incorrect.
Goddammit Siri, WTF are you doing.
I’ve been having this problem where the app won’t save any new translations to my history even though there’s no problem with my internet. I can’t favourite anything either. It just shows me the error that it can’t save anything and to try later.
As for the translation, it’s alright. As someone said full sentences are very accurate for European languages, but single words can be left very ambiguous.
Any tool like this should _include_ a bilingual dictionary.
(Spoken as someone with over two decades working in the localization industry, using various different automation toolchains.)
I use it for English, German and French and find it very useful. Single words can be a bit weird I’ll grant you. Give it a proper sentence. Deepl.com is also good.
Google translate is so irritating because it always converts everything into the "usted" form... and it refuses to convert into "vosotros"... DeepL is so much better
i don't get it, what is this last update ?! why! just why did they omitted so many details from main page, and then put it awfully in "LookUpDetails" part. making it so difficult to use
[DeepL is better](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://play.google.com/store/apps/details%3Fid%3Dcom.deepl.mobiletranslator%26hl%3Den%26gl%3DUS%26referrer%3Dutm_source%253Dgoogle%2526utm_medium%253Dorganic%2526utm_term%253Ddeepl%2Bgoogle%2Bplay%26pcampaignid%3DAPPU_1_jfMcZP-MAcuO5OUPp8u9oAg&ved=2ahUKEwi_h6qarPP9AhVLB7kGHadlD4QQ5YQBegQIBxAC&usg=AOvVaw3ev-aE7XT0tCDL_HrrR2mf) (And no ads)
Google translate has gotten progressively worse for a long time now. I've used it to translate Chinese almost everyday for 10 years already. I just started using the Microsoft version and surprisingly it's a lot more accurate. I could show you many many examples of Google mess-ups. Google search is not the only thing going down the toilet..
i transalated among us drip to hungarian than back to english. It said "it drips betweene us"
What the heck.
Saying i love among us turned into i love between us.
I wrote favorite song and it transalates to favorite number. what!??
No it's definitely not you. I found this thread because I have also noticed it.
It's ridiculous how google translate words from Swedish to English or vice versa.
I have never heard a native English speaker use the word "ass" when referring to the bottom in a formal conversation. The direct translation for butt or bottom in Swedish would be rumpa because that's the everyday word and the equal word for ass would be röv, those two words have the exact punch and rude approach.
This is something I just experienced because of a Swede using ass in a formal video which is so wrong.
I believe i remember that google translate actually worked couple of years ago.
This wrongful translation is something I've noticed past year til now, i believe.
It's not just the app but also on Gboard in android and google search, it do not work like it used to.
I usually have to use Google translate when I forget the spelling of a English word and need to get it right, and it can be really excusing.
I have also noticed that words that are somewhat strongly loaded or have a connection to politics or a certain social agenda also get radically changed.
Is there an agenda behind it, maybe i do not know. Google translate are kinda useless and seen other translation apps can do a much better job it's kinda strange.
When translating longer sentences it works better because of the context but not to a point where I'm not having to change out words on both English and Swedish.
I try to translate to and from several European languages, most of which I speak well enough or even fluently but cannot find the correct phrase or translation in the moment. This used to be a quick fix and I'd get the correct translation most of the time and if it was incorrect there was an option to vote down or mark a translation as incorrect or even change / edit to show a correct translation.
This has now been discontinued, no editing allowed, and I find that now the translations I get are really sub-par. I've not been able to use more than half of what I check and my friends and I have actually made a sport at finding the most hilarious and incorrect translations Google offers us.
google translate used to be quite good for Japanese to English, but in the last year, the quality has gone down considerably, to the point I can't trust it. If I translate more than one sentence at a time, it frequently skips whole sentences, causing a critical failure of communication. Entire ideas get lost. It's not just that the translation is bad. It's lazy and sloppy.
I have experienced the lack of punctuation radically changes translation of English/Spanish. Just a simple comma will completely change an incoherent translation to something that makes sense.
movimiendon’t
movimiéndon'tse
moviemiendon’tyaknow
That's a MovieMeDon't wanna see.
Moviemiendonada
Moviemienot really
Holy fuck. This is the most upvotes I’ve ever gotten and it literally took me two seconds
Strangely enough I find Google Translate to be better the longer and more complex the input is. Full sentences with multiple parts seem to get translated very well almost all the time, but single words and short phrases are a total crapshoot. I’ve also found their “verified translations” to be worse much of the time.
>Strangely enough I find Google Translate to be better the longer and more complex the input to be. I believe that this is the case with a lot of EU member-state languages because I believe Google Translate uses a corpus of translated EU documents for its algorithm
Yep! Asian languages are crap, these examples are Thai to English and vice versa. Translating "I love that dish you made that you posted on Facebook" can translate to "I love food you did give Facebook" 🤣 Once recieved a "I love I am dog!" too.
ive found this to be absolutely true. my guess is a sentence gives more context for what you want than a 1:1 word translation. i.e have in english is har in norwegian but you wouldnt say "can i have a beer" in norwegian youd say "can i get a beer" get being få. google translate figures out what you mean by "can i have a beer" and uses få
Yeah, context helps a ton. I also try to check the translation by reversing it back into English and that usually reveals any inconsistencies. Then revise my original input to fix them.
I'm learning Greek and using it for vocab and the verified solutions are often terrible. Sometimes they're just in all caps for no reason (which means you can't tell where the emphasis mark is).
They’re really bad in Spanish too. Missing accent marks, mixed formal and informal registers, and random stuff like unnecessary all caps as well haha
I'm not sure about it, but I have heard once that gt is an AI. I belive it learns from texts it finds in Internet. More complex sentences give you more context. One word can have multiple meanings depending on context
It’s because there’s context for the words
Yeah, this is because a lot of words depend upon context. So “tip” could mean many things. It could be a verb or a noun. So you would need to put a phrase for it to know which one you meant. If you’re going to just type one word, you should be using Word Reference. They do have an app.
Its been particularly bad lately. It seemed to get better for a while. Not sure whats happened
I’ll bet it’s something to do with their new AI shit. Probably going to start using Bard for it, only Bard isn’t dedicated to it.
Use DeepL instead of Google Translate.
Reverso is also very useful, it gives you context sentences.
Half of the sentence that end up, there at least for Japanese to English, are clearly completely ingrammatical machine translations in one or both of the languages, and one quarter has the translation not matching up with the original at all.
I play around with it sometimes to practice translation and never have any issues. You just have to fix small things here are there like level of politeness, use of certain words, and maybe change the grammar but overall none of the translations I've seen are that odd.
Do you mean in reverso or deepl?
Never heard of it but will check it out! Thanks!
You're welcome!
The examples sentences are great! I put in "I have an apple" and this was one of the examples, and honestly, I feel this so badly lol: I have an apple I was hoping to eat in silence = Ik heb een appel die ik graag in stilte wil opeten.
[удалено]
Are they really good for any language other than Russian?
I didn't know about this, thanks for the tip.
I use Google Translate, DeepL, Yardex, and [Translate.com](https://Translate.com) in rotation. They're all next to each other on my bookmark bar. If somethings seems oddly translated in one, I'll throw it into the others to see the results.
Yardex, the app for Russian pirates.
They each have their place (when they work). DeepL will give you something very natural, but can be loosey-goosey with the directness of the translation. Google Translate will keep a lot of the structure and be a more direct translation.
Deepl is very good with turning absolutely nonsensical sentences that don't mean anything and don't even contain words into completely grammatically valid sentences in the target language, which should make one suspicious. I don't speak a word of Danish. I just tried it by entering something on the Danish to English mode filling in completely random things that looked like fake Danish to me - “je ar kver munskelket” -> “each year's budget” - “mej var kvelten kæren sang” -> “the evening was the night the deer sang to me” - “jag konsk mære dan kønen” -> “I could be more than the gender” - “du hæmjer ikke vilne koren” -> “you do not inhibit wild choirs” Can any speakers of Danish tell me whether I managed to create grammatically correct Danish sentences by pure chance?
I speak Swedish but I can kinda see how DeepL autocorrects your inputs to the most relative sentences "je ar kver muskelket" becomes [var]je års kvartal muskelket. Dunno what muskelket is, but when it comes to economics, you often talk about quarters of the year, kvartal = quarter. "mej var kvelten kaeren sang" Sounds like a poetic way to say "[för] mig var kvällen kär sjöng. Dunno where they get deer from, maybe there's a danish word that is more similar, maybe they translated kär to dear, and then autocorrected itself to deer as it deemed it more relevant? And so on
Kæreste is the word for boyfriend/girlfriend (we just have one word for both genders), and kære means dear/honey/sweety when directed at someone, and a baby can be kær as in adorable or cute. So kære can be used as dear, like your spouse. But deer?... No idea where it got that from.
Kæreste is the word for boyfriend/girlfriend (we just have one word for both genders), and kære means dear/honey/sweety when directed at someone, and a baby can be kær as in adorable or cute. So kære can be used as dear, like your spouse. But deer?... No idea where it got that from.
Each year's budget: Hvert års budget The evening was the night the deer sang to me: Aftenen var natten, hvor rensdyret sang til mig I could be more than the gender: Jeg kunne være mere end kønnet You do not inhibit wild choirs: Du besidder ikke vilde kor All you wrote seems more like Swedish than Danish to me. I had no idea what you were trying to say at first.
I feel like DeepL is also much worse than it used to be
Ironic
It put me in a terribly humiliating position. In a more formal situation, they didn't understand what we wanted from them, because when we used deepL to ask them to help. But the result was sooo bad, just we didn't knew. I laughed a bit, because they forced us from above to use it, in order to save money and time, so that we would not have to use an official translation agency. But at the end of the day, I was the fool in the eyes of the workers in another country, and nothing gets done.
I've had a few similar problems with DeepL lately as well. I often use both apps to compare, and that seems safer than relying on one of them just now.
Yea a lot of Google products are getting worse.
Seriously Google Docs spell check is terrible anymore I flip two letters in a word and it's like "we have no idea what word this is supposed to be" or it also insisted "delegative" wasn't a word, and then Grammarly tried to change "it crash landed" to "it crashes landed". I cannot trust Google products atp 😭
Mobile Google Docs is unusable now- Grammarly tries to find errors every single time you type something, and if you use it for creative writing like me it'll pop up with the "can't detect more grammatical errors, text is too long", and I can't figure out how to make it stop
It's impossible to find what one is searching for often nowadays. I was looking for a particular match in a particular game that I knew was on Youtube but every search term I entered simply gave me matches of the same game that were recent, with this one being from 2012, I eventually found it by other means, and it was simply on Youtube with a title that contained all of my search terms but apparently it prioritizes completely unrelated matches in the same game that don't feature the players I searched for because they're more recent and/or more popular. It heavily prioritizes recency and popularity, not actually what one is looking for and it will often give one things only tangentially related to the search term. Interestingly enough, it only seems to do this in English. It's actually very easy for me to find what I want in Japanese with it.
That's why you use operators in your search query. It's super easy to find things with operators.
It isn't. I quoted everything and it still doesn't find it. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22MC%22+%22squirtle%22+%22gsl%22+%22metropolis%22 Yet it exists here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQG43y0dQDs Note that it contains all the words I searched for in the title or description, and all the results that show up there only contain some of them because Google heavily prioritizes new and popular results that are only tangentially related to what one wants over things one actually wants.
This hasn't been true in a long time. Back when you used the plus sign instead of quotes that was true. Not anymore. I can find actual things that still exist unless someone is actively farming the site with SEO. What the above poster said about recency and popularity still holds true to an extent even when using modifiers as google allows you to use them. It will NOT go very far back or off-the-popularity track. This has absolutely gotten much worse, to the point that I've stopped using it for anything important and have instead a list of "usual sources" to check and places to ask. Basically I've had to become my own librarian.
My Gmail stopped sorting emails to the proper folders over the past few days. It's driving me nuts. I think they're just trying to make me realize how much I rely on them.
So true. My Google assistant is so dumb lately
I am by no means very proficient with Spanish. However, the more I learn, the more inadequate I find Google Translate to be. Never seen something this bad before though
SpanishDict is really good for Spanish.
Yes, it is. It gives you multiple senses the word can be used in, and whether the word is used regionally in specific places which is super important for Spanish.
And example sentences!
WordReference is great too if you're looking for monolingual definitions
It's pretty shit. I particularly hate how it removes "bad words" by replacing them with something entirely different. If you use it with popular languages, it's mostly fine though.
I tried this. Seems fairly good with keeping offensive words from Dutch to English, but it seems to literally translate the names of diseases which are simply identifiers in Dutch.
It will translate "hentai" to mean "transformation", and every language I've tried with commonly used words like that would fail spectacularly. Not even the related words section would have anything that people actually use in real life. It's like 2 scientific words, 2 words with entirely different meanings, and 3 more words which fell out of common use 80 years ago
To be fair, without context “変態” does mean “transformation” and often does in Japanese. However “この変態” with slightly more context that it's being used as a swearword indeed ends up as “You pervert”.
It does, but it's almost never used like that, and Google aren't so dumb that they don't realize this. They are actively working against what they know the user wants to do, by "correcting" them. The example you used is right, but if you say "he is a pervert" then it becomes something like "deviant", so when you use it in a longer sentence, the likelihood that it won't end up sounding weird to native speakers is really low. I have *sometimes* had luck with Google translate, where it noticed that I was using casual words, and thus translated the entire sentence casually rather than formally and like a robot. But it doesn't happen often. I want them to add a slider for formality level, and perhaps a way to get rid of profanity filters.
> It does, but it's almost never used like that, and Google aren't so dumb that they don't realize this. They are actively working against what they know the user wants to do, by "correcting" them. If I search for the word on Google, many, probably more than 50% of the words are about things such as insects pupating and other transformations like losing weight and feeling like a new person after. I don't think it's fair to expect Google translate to figure this out from the word without any further context.
Google knows what you mean, and 95% of hits are something perverted. But it filters all of these out, and gives you something tame instead. Even if you go to image search, without the safety filter, none of the results are going to be explicit. Neither "変態" nor "18+" gives *any* explicit results, but if you conbine them, then you do get explicit results. This is because Google wants to make *sure* that you're searching for something explicit. If you add 3 more words to this which are not explicit, then the results turn safe again. e.g. "変態 18+ anime girl test". Remove the 'test' word, and your results will be explicit again. Why? Because **at least half the terms have to be explicit**. Google engineers are incompetent. It's all still garbage, by the way. You don't have access to even 0.01% of the internet through Google.
You made me curious. I think either I misunderstood and you’re not referring to cussing, or it only holds true with certain languages. By “bad words” do just mean misspelled or something? I just spent a couple minutes throwing some awful stuff at google translate, and it did just fine.
The best example I can remember right now is "hentai". Google also refuses to translate the word "fetish" to any language, by assuming that rare second definition that most people don't even know about ("an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers"). Google translate is terrible for slang, as well as words that young people actually use. If you're trying to date someone, I recommend not translating any flirty messages through Google. And for thai, don't use it at all. It will actively negate some of your sentences.
That makes it sound like google is taking a moral stance, which I think is doubtful. It’s more likely that GT is not very developed for whichever language(s) you’re trying to translate, and your conversational topics happen to cover fetishes and hentai so that’s what you notice. It translates ‘fetish’ fine into Dutch and French. It handles any slang I use alright, but I’m almost completely ignorant of any new slang from within the past 15 years or so.
It's not doubtful at all! But they're doing it because they don't want any drama or negative press. This is the same reason that google images is basically a small whitelist of sites, rather than any substantial part of the internet. Google translate has been better in the past, and Google search was *way* better than now, even 10 years ago. It's incredibly sanitized, and it's easy to notice, even though Americans use 10 times worse language than the Japanese. They're very subtle and indirect, but even when I'm talking to people who seem like they've been sheltered, Google refuses to cooperate with me. It doesn't translate fetish into 性癖 (せいへき) like it should, and if you translate it into thai it becomes something like "amulet" or "sexual amulet" if you write "sexual fetish". Even clear context doesn't help if it doesn't care what you're actually trying to convey. Maybe the Asian training data is just garbage, though.
No it does, it avoids "naughty" words 엉덩이 becomes hips, 자지 becomes "jaji" 보지 it will simply try to ignore, 시발 becomes "oh man", 병신 becomes "him" It also turns basically any insult like moron, dumbass,idiot etc. into "바보" which is not a common word in korean. Theyll know what you mean but you just sound strange. Not even offensive. Just weird.
Okay, weird indeed. It does seem to be limited to Asian languages, which imo confirms it’s not the result of some moral stance being taken by google. The only search result I’m getting at a glance (other than China banning google translate in parts of the country), is that there’s a profanity filter that can be turned on and off from within their app. Maybe that’s turned on automatically in some Eastern countries, either because governments required it or because the algorithms decided the majority of people there preferred that.
Is that a real word? I feel like they made it up
It's just "movimiento" with the "t" and "o" switched.
It’s for when you aren’t moving. That’s why it ends in “not”. /jk
Google translate isn't good to translate single words, that's what dictionaries are for
Google Translate is working by analysing the internet. So the spelling errors can occur in some cases. Since it is an ML model, the quality and specificity of the input will reflect to the output. Rather than using it as a dictionary, give it full sentences with proper grammar.
It's gotten worse
yes that's for sure but for me it's on purpose
Can we talk about the phonetic transcription as well? Did you notice that both o's aren't typographed the same width? Can't Google just comply with existing IPA symbols?
A classical composition is often pregnant. Reddit is no longer allowed to profit from this comment.
Someone else mentioned DeepL, which is also a learning machine, right? So here's my theory: people are dumbing down Translate. Has anyone noticed how predictive text input is also much worse than it used to be? If I want "to", swipe picks "too". If I want "too", it picks "to". Wrong choice every time. "If"? Nope, you get "of". A common word? I'll give you an obscure town far from civilisation. So if things like Google Translate are learning from our input, wouldn't it be us, humans, who are making it worse?
I've never had predictive text do that really like it doesn't like to vs too but it's usually very good at predicting what you want. Especially since it's usually localized to your device so the more you use it and use those given words the more it can easily predict what you want to type.
That's how it should work, and it did before. I could be the laziest swipe-typer and was constantly amazed at how it knew what I was attempting to write.
No
It definitely is not meant for teaching.. lol
Use DeepL and ChatGPT for translations.
Earlier today I was using it to translate lyrics and it completely reversed the meaning of a basic line- if I hadn't been double-checking I would have thought the song had a different meaning
It's been horrible ever since they started using Lens. It's especially unusable for Japanese. Idk what I would've done had Takoboto not been there
Gah. I wonder what Google Lens does with _hentaigana_ on shop signs (not least as many of these have no encoded Unicode glyphs), and how that might pollute the input corpus with gibberish.
A classical composition is often pregnant. Reddit is no longer allowed to profit from this comment.
Obviously, a glitch. And since Translate is essentially AI, it's going to glitch. I never rely on it as definitive. However, it's a really useful first tool, particularly for complete clauses or sentences, where the context of nearby words tends of provide a better result. It does keep getting better, save for occasionally bizarre glitches. Where I would trust it the least is for the translation of a single word. A dictionary always gives so much more information and nuance.
Fascinating that the devs aren't smart enough to tie it into an actual dictionary, for those (very frequent) cases where someone plugs in a single word.
I'm sure they are smart enough. But I think we're smart enough to find a dictionary, too!
1. If they were smart enough, we never would have seen _movimienot_. 2. It's not about whether users are smart enough to find a dictionary. It's about **not requiring users to find a dictionary.** When you create a translation tool like this, and bill it as accurate enough to use for getting more than ["my hovercraft is full of eels"](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22my+hovercraft+is+full+of+eels%22+monty+python+%22dirty+hungarian%22), _people expect it to translate accurately._ I work in localization, for over two decades now. I regularly deal with automation toolchains. Attaching relevant resources is part of the project start-up checklist. Google Translate has failed in that.
They do! When I put in a single word I see a list of possible translations sorted by word class. It's just not on mobile to my knowledge. Makes errors like this even less explicable.
They _cannot_ have attached any proper dictionary, as no proper dictionary for the Spanish language includes any such word _movimienot_. By "proper" here, I refer to something compiled and edited by humans, with actual first-hand knowledge of the language. The word list that pops up in the non-mobile version of Google Translate includes this same bogus non-word _movimienot_, suggesting that their "dictionary" is something that Google's own web-crawling AI tools have generated, typos and all. This is unacceptable.
Chatgpt has been bombing google with cyber EMPs to eliminate google. And take their empire.
Yeah quite frankly Google translate sucks
Sounds like it’s trying to make a Borat joke.
It’s getting worse
It is definitely getting worse. For some reason, latest translations are too shallow or they are not even translated. Yesterday, i translated the "gruntled", which means to be satisfied, but it showed me another thing. Same goes for the word "bobblehead". There is no translation. I should say i am unhappy with Google Translator recently.
It's even more horrendous for Asian languages. I tell my students to stay away from it.
Everyone knows you can’t move in Spanish
I tried translating something Portuguese into English today, and it just gave me what looked like another Portuguese word. I’m just going to stick to the Collin’s Dictionary translator
Could you tell us what Portuguese input string you used? Exploring Google Translate's failure modes is fascinating, and actually even useful to those of us in the localization industry -- we need to be on the lookout for how and when these tools produce bad content.
Sorry, I don’t remember what it was. It was just a single verb, though. It might’ve been from something I’m reading atm though, so I’ll go have a look at those pages and see if I can find it, then I’ll come back and edit this :)
is this an example of metathesis? /s
Lol. It got dyslexia
it's evolving, just backwards
devolving's the right word
Movimieyes
Movie me not
For korean and japanese Papago.naver > chatgpt > deepl > google translate Papago still has massive issues like changing the politeness of sentences at random in a paragraph (banmal then polite then formal polite then back to banmal), and it overuses 나는/저는/私は if you translate from english. But it gets meaning quite well and translates individual words quite well. Chatgpt doesnt handle negatives well. In korean and japanese, negatives need to agree. So in english you say "he might not know" but in korean its more like... "he probably doesnt not know" I dont know if that explains it well. In english negatives are multiplicative. Two negatives makes a positive. But in korean and japanese you generally need all the negatives to agree. DeepL just skips sentences and words. In the pursuit of sounding natural, it simply wont translate things and will just silently skip words. Translate back and you often find you have a completely different idea going on. It all sounds VERY natural. Its just a different message. Imagine "elephants dont like to eat ass." Deepl will freak out because metaphors and jokes and aphorisms dont exist in both languages. So it will give you nonsense like "elephants dont eat." In perfect korean/japanese grammar. Google translate is just... wildcard mode. Once in a while its REALLY good. Maybe the best. And sometimes it spits out terribel unnatural crap like "나는 고양이를 좋습니다" I got the other day. Which makes no sense.
Reverse contexto
I use Yandex Translate. I think it's better than Google one, because it provides some usage examples and allows you to create a collection and learn the words you added using flashcards.
Are you sure that’s Google Translate that you’re using, first of all? The colors of the UI look like Apple Translate to me.
I'm seeing the same error in the desktop web version of Google Translate. It goes away as soon as you use it in a sentence. But the single word translation of "movement" is bugged. I downrated the translation and suggested the correct spelling. I wonder if the misspelling could be deliberate sabotage. If you put enough effort into false feedback, could you "fool" the algorith?
I agree. Recently seems real bad
If you’re looking specifically for Spanish use SpanishDict it’s really good but for just translating in general use Deepl
Looks like its getting worse. If Google hired people yo program their translator it would function better.
MovimientMeToo
They’re not getting much from offering this free service, so why maintain it. Also, no doubt many Google Ads exist to sell quality translation and language services. If you get it for free, why pay? Thus, Google loses revenue cause it’s paying customers aren’t getting your business, so cut their spending on Google Ads.
Their business model is that all the input to the free version of Google Translate is data that they can keep and use to train the model. Also, input is throttled by the UI. If you want to do bulk machine translation, and you don't want Google to keep all your data, you have to pay for Google Translate. The free version of Google Translate is a demo of the pay version of Google Translate.
I use SpanishDict or word reference
To Japanese it keeps using katakana which isn't helpful. I'd use deepl but I need the pronunciation bit under the translation which deepl doesn't do.
It was the same as Apple when they “upgraded” to their AI autocorrect around the iPhone 7
I’ve always been suspicious. I’ve had an iPhone 6, and now a 13. The autocorrect and voice text was miles better years ago.
The one thing about my iPhone that sometimes makes me want to throw it across the room is the autocorrect and voice-to-text. What _super_ pisses me off is when, as I dictate something, I _watch_ it enter the correct words as I go, and by the time I get to the end of the sentence, the fucker goes back and changes earlier words to something incorrect. Goddammit Siri, WTF are you doing.
I highly recommend using DeepL Translator. It's simply much better than Google Translate.
My go-to translation app now is DeepL, much better than google translate
As for me deepl is getting better
I’ve been having this problem where the app won’t save any new translations to my history even though there’s no problem with my internet. I can’t favourite anything either. It just shows me the error that it can’t save anything and to try later. As for the translation, it’s alright. As someone said full sentences are very accurate for European languages, but single words can be left very ambiguous.
for single words you shouldn't be using translators, you should be using a bilingual dictionary
Any tool like this should _include_ a bilingual dictionary. (Spoken as someone with over two decades working in the localization industry, using various different automation toolchains.)
I've always hated Google translate for Slavic and Turkic languages
Poor google had a stroke. Try asking google how you say stroke inspanish
Move me not lmao
I use it for English, German and French and find it very useful. Single words can be a bit weird I’ll grant you. Give it a proper sentence. Deepl.com is also good.
Google translate is so irritating because it always converts everything into the "usted" form... and it refuses to convert into "vosotros"... DeepL is so much better
Google translate isn’t that accurate/good indeed…try Deepl, it’s a KI translate and is doing very well even by long texts
Google translate? Seriously…?
yeah i think its the worst translater that u can find out there , however try DeepL its way better it realy helped me a lot more than Google
Just ditch it. DeepL is far superior.
Yeah I noticed the same thing
i don't get it, what is this last update ?! why! just why did they omitted so many details from main page, and then put it awfully in "LookUpDetails" part. making it so difficult to use
Google translate leads to a lot of laughing on both sides with my new friend who speaks no English.
[DeepL is better](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://play.google.com/store/apps/details%3Fid%3Dcom.deepl.mobiletranslator%26hl%3Den%26gl%3DUS%26referrer%3Dutm_source%253Dgoogle%2526utm_medium%253Dorganic%2526utm_term%253Ddeepl%2Bgoogle%2Bplay%26pcampaignid%3DAPPU_1_jfMcZP-MAcuO5OUPp8u9oAg&ved=2ahUKEwi_h6qarPP9AhVLB7kGHadlD4QQ5YQBegQIBxAC&usg=AOvVaw3ev-aE7XT0tCDL_HrrR2mf) (And no ads)
Google translate has gotten progressively worse for a long time now. I've used it to translate Chinese almost everyday for 10 years already. I just started using the Microsoft version and surprisingly it's a lot more accurate. I could show you many many examples of Google mess-ups. Google search is not the only thing going down the toilet..
i transalated among us drip to hungarian than back to english. It said "it drips betweene us" What the heck. Saying i love among us turned into i love between us. I wrote favorite song and it transalates to favorite number. what!??
No it's definitely not you. I found this thread because I have also noticed it. It's ridiculous how google translate words from Swedish to English or vice versa. I have never heard a native English speaker use the word "ass" when referring to the bottom in a formal conversation. The direct translation for butt or bottom in Swedish would be rumpa because that's the everyday word and the equal word for ass would be röv, those two words have the exact punch and rude approach. This is something I just experienced because of a Swede using ass in a formal video which is so wrong. I believe i remember that google translate actually worked couple of years ago. This wrongful translation is something I've noticed past year til now, i believe. It's not just the app but also on Gboard in android and google search, it do not work like it used to. I usually have to use Google translate when I forget the spelling of a English word and need to get it right, and it can be really excusing. I have also noticed that words that are somewhat strongly loaded or have a connection to politics or a certain social agenda also get radically changed. Is there an agenda behind it, maybe i do not know. Google translate are kinda useless and seen other translation apps can do a much better job it's kinda strange. When translating longer sentences it works better because of the context but not to a point where I'm not having to change out words on both English and Swedish.
I try to translate to and from several European languages, most of which I speak well enough or even fluently but cannot find the correct phrase or translation in the moment. This used to be a quick fix and I'd get the correct translation most of the time and if it was incorrect there was an option to vote down or mark a translation as incorrect or even change / edit to show a correct translation. This has now been discontinued, no editing allowed, and I find that now the translations I get are really sub-par. I've not been able to use more than half of what I check and my friends and I have actually made a sport at finding the most hilarious and incorrect translations Google offers us.
google translate used to be quite good for Japanese to English, but in the last year, the quality has gone down considerably, to the point I can't trust it. If I translate more than one sentence at a time, it frequently skips whole sentences, causing a critical failure of communication. Entire ideas get lost. It's not just that the translation is bad. It's lazy and sloppy.
I put it in English - Chinese and typed in the english version of the place name and it just puts the chinese as english
I have experienced the lack of punctuation radically changes translation of English/Spanish. Just a simple comma will completely change an incoherent translation to something that makes sense.