Hi bdlatimer,
Our system is case-sensitive because the case of text does provide
some important information about the meaning of a word.
For example, if you see "I want to buy an apple" vs. "I want to buy an
Apple", the first sentence is pretty clear I want a piece of fruit,
but in the second sentence I might be talking about buying an Apple
computer.
That being said, translation is hard, and sometimes the decisions our
system makes on case might not be the best ones, but rest assured that
we're constantly trying to improve that.
For your specific example, we leave that phrase un-translated likely
because it looks like a named entity... in which case it might not
make sense for us to translate that name, but removing the capitalized
T makes us recognize it as any old phrase, and we gladly translate it.
Thanks for the feedback.
Best,
Josh
On Jul 29, 7:14 pm, bdlatimer wrote:
> Why in the world is the translation case-sensitive - and fails to
> result in valid output, depending on case?
>
> I was attempting to verify a translation of an old album name - Las
> Ketchup's "Hijas del Tomate" - and Google Translate failed miserably.
> The output from Spanish to English is indicated to be … "Hijas del
> Tomate". Gee, that's useful.
>
> When plugging in "hijas del tomate" (all lower-case), however, the
> correct result ("tomato daughters") is shown.
>
> Why do the capital letters have any effect on the translation output
> at all?
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