Thanks Josh, I'm not as well versed in the technical aspects of this as I am the linguistic ones, but appreciate that it is a big task. I think the priority should be on getting grammatically correct translations between languages, whatever the variety used. I may be a speaker of British English, but I'd much rather have a translation into grammatically correct American English than a translation that was gibberish. :)
I notice that Google Translate translates 'form a queue' (which is more British English) into Brazilian Portuguese as 'formar uma fila', but when I tried using 'form a line' (which is more American) I got 'formar uma linha', which is a literal translation. The correct translation in Brazilian Portuguese is 'fazer uma fila', literally 'to make a queue (or line)'. In European Portuguese, it would be 'fazer uma bicha', which literally means 'make a worm', but in Brazil, 'bicha' means 'queer' or 'fag', and Google's translation reflects this. When I translate the word 'fila' from Portuguese into English, I get 'queue', as in British English, with 'line' only being the third meaning listed. I translated 'we travel by bus' into Portuguese, and although it produced the Brazilian Portuguese 'viajamos de ônibus', I could click on the word 'ônibus' and replace it with the European 'autocarro'. Regards Ken On Apr 4, 10:00 pm, Josh (Google Employee) wrote: > Hi guys, > > We would love to be able to provide different distinct systems for > each dialect of languages, but unfortunately it can be very > challenging as a large aspect of our system is training off parallel > data, and before we can train of that data we have to detect what > language it is. It is quite difficult in a large scale fashion to > write language detectors that can differentiate between the various > dialects of languages. > > We'll keep working on it, but it's unlikely we'll be able to offer > distinct dialects for many of the languages any time in the near > future. > > Best, > Josh > > On Apr 4, 7:57 am, Ken Westmoreland wrote: > > > > > I agree, same with American and British English, or Castilian and > > Latin American Spanish. It wouldn't be that hard to do, as the > > differences are no greater than those between Indonesian and Malay, or > > Czech and Slovak, which are considered separate languages. There are > > two forms of Norwegian, Bokmål and Nynorsk, even though they're > > spoken in the same country. > > > On Apr 4, 2:09 pm, Nelson do Nascimento wrote: > > > > Hello, > > > > I don't use Google Translator to translate to Portuguese, I only > > > translate to English, because when I translate something to Portuguese > > > it comes out in Brazilian-Portuguese, it's simply not correct and not > > > accurate, Google should defenitly try to solve this out.- Hide quoted > > > text - > > - Show quoted text - -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-translate-general?hl=en.
