Translate Ten years of Google Translate. Apr 28, min read. Copy link. Barak Turovsky. Google Translate helps people make connections. Translate can help people help each other, often in the most difficult of times. Recently we visited a community in Canada that is using Translate to break down barriers and make a refugee family feel more welcome:. There are more than million of you using Google Translate.
Together we translate more than billion words a day. Translations reflect trends and events. So far, 3. A few properly translated sentences can make a huge difference when faced with a foreign language or country. Brazil uses Google Translate more than any other country.
Ninety-two percent of our translations come from outside of the United States, with Brazil topping the list. You can see the world in your language. Linguistics has no such formula. The Google approach is that a simple approach over a huge trove of data is better than a clever approach over limited data. With so much data, errors will, it is hoped, cancel each other out in the enormous aggregate.
In addition to all that unmarked, untagged messy data, Google does get some specialty data from professional translators: the European Patent Office shares data with Google, for example, though Hughes says that this EPO data despite its high quality does not currently have any special weight in the public-facing Google Translate. He notes, sensibly enough, that many people use Google Translate for slangy or spoken-language purposes, for which giving too much weight to the kind of language in a patent application would be less than ideal.
But even Google has limits on what enormous amounts of data can do. There are thousands of potential language pairings across the several dozen languages Google Translate offers. But for the vast majority of those pairings Finnish-Zulu, say , there is little or no training text available, even on a trillion web pages.
This of course magnifies the possibilities for error. This leads to another problem. Pereltsvaig has translated this phrase with Google Translate, however badly. The dud translation now lives on the web, where it will be crawled by Google—and could be fed back into Google Translate.
What if the service is, to put it crudely, consuming its own waste? In their house, everything comes in pairs. Dans leur maison, tout vient en paires.
The program fell into my trap, not realizing, as any human reader would, that I was describing a couple, stressing that for each item he had, she had a similar one. Next I translated the challenge phrase into French myself, in a way that did preserve the intended meaning. Chez eux, ils ont tout en double. At home, they have everything in double. There is his own car and his own car, his own towels and his own towels, his own library and his own library.
We humans know all sorts of things about couples, houses, personal possessions, pride, rivalry, jealousy, privacy, and many other intangibles that lead to such quirks as a married couple having towels embroidered his and hers.
But I still felt I should check the engine out more closely. After all, one swallow does not thirst quench. By the way, I checked my translation with two native speakers of German, including Karl Sigmund, so I think you can assume it is accurate. As for female scholars, well, they had no place in the system at all; nothing was clearer than that. And scientists did not question anyway; There were few of them. So far, so good! But soon it grows wobbly, and the further down you go, the wobblier it gets.
The last two sentences really bring out how crucial understanding is for translation. The related letter noun Wissenschaftlerin , found in the closing sentence in its plural form Wissenschaftlerinnen , is a consequence of the gendered-ness of German nouns. Aside from that blunder, the rest of the final sentence is a disaster.
Take its first half. It just consists of English words haphazardly triggered by the German words. Is that all it takes for a piece of output to deserve the label translation? The translation engine was not imagining large or small amounts or numbers of things.
It was just throwing symbols around, without any notion that they might symbolize something. For decades, sophisticated people—even some artificial-intelligence researchers—have fallen for the ELIZA effect. Google Translate is all about bypassing or circumventing the act of understanding language.
To me, the word translation exudes a mysterious and evocative aura. It denotes a profoundly human art form that graciously carries clear ideas in Language A into clear ideas in Language B, and the bridging act should not only maintain clarity but also give a sense for the flavor, quirks, and idiosyncrasies of the writing style of the original author.
Whenever I translate, I first read the original text carefully and internalize the ideas as clearly as I can, letting them slosh back and forth in my mind. Needless to say, most of this halo is unconscious. I try to say in Language B what strikes me as a natural B-ish way to talk about the kinds of situations that constitute the halo of meaning in question.
I am not , in short, moving straight from words and phrases in Language A to words and phrases in Language B. This is the kind of thing I imagine when I hear an evocative phrase like deep mind. That said, I turn now to Chinese, a language that gave the deep-learning software a far rougher ride than the two European languages did. Her book recounts the intertwined lives of herself; her husband, Qian Zhongshu also a novelist and translator , and their daughter.
It is not written in an especially arcane manner, but it uses an educated, lively Chinese. I chose a short passage and let Google Translate loose on it. Here are the results, along with my own translation again vetted by native speakers of Chinese :. After Zhongshu had worked at Tsinghua University for a year, he was transferred to the committee that was translating selected works of Chairman Mao.
He lived in the city, but each weekend he would return to school.
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