I asked this question sometimes ago, only getting as answer a question that expressed the feeling, that my question came as a surprise. You can also see it following this link: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/google-translate-general/eOyqhbac0bs/discussion
So I tried by myself to get more clear about what and why this might be wrong and I try to give a short overview over it in this topic. But first some words about me. As you might see, my mothertounge is neither English nor Chinese nor Korean (it's German), but I rely heavily on the translation tools from Google to communicate with Chinese (and some Korean) people. I found out that the following things make the use of of the translator quite hard or impossible sometimes: 1, I feel that the dataset used is still not big enough, many words and phrases just can't be understood. Look at the following simple Korean sentence taken from a discussion of a Facebook photo: korean: 헐 후지다 한국어 완전 잘하네 ? translation: Hull complete 잘하네 hujida Korean? I think nobody is able to understand anything with that translation. And clearly there are some words, the translator doesn't even know how to use. This is the only example about korean, the rest will mostly deal with Chinese because I have some basic knowledge of Chinese language, but none of Korean. 2. Word composition out of characters sometimes is wrong. I can't deliver an example now, sorry. If I experience one I can write it as an answer to this topic. Anyway, I wish very often, that I could tell the translator not just to change the understanding of a certain textblock or change the order of the blocks but also which character belongs to which block. I already do a lot of work by hand, to help the translator get a better understanding (like inserting new lines to let him translate single words isntead of whole blocks, deleting characters, changing parts of the translations and translated block orders). 3. There are a lot of words that can't be translated, like 阿. These words are used often in Chinese but shouldn't be translated at all into English. Other words like 了 and 的 express meanings that are expressed in form of gramar rules in most western languages, like the relationship between 2 things or the relative time of an event. The translator doesn't understand all these word types very badly and treats them badly which leads to me needing to delete them to get any meaningful translation (and sometimes still a bad one because these words are not used without reason. Also 阿 has a meaning. It should relax the atmosphere and improve the sound of a sentence) 4. The biggest need for a fast translator for whole texts, like the google translator, is in my eyes to translate texts you find on the internet, like blog posts. These posts use a quite relaxed and maybe dialect or street slang heavy way of talking. But the translator only seems to understand the meaning of a sentence, if it is written in highly standardised mandarin. The use case and the usage ability doesn't work together at all. 5. Like in every language, there are hip and modern words. A up to date translator should be able to understand it. Like the following 2 phrases should be translated the same way, but the translator doesn't get it all (even after telling him sometimes): 什么, 神马 6. Often chinese people don't like to use sentence delimiters at all, when just chatting with friends or communicating in a facebook-comment like fashion. So they often just use a space character where they actually should use a sentence delimiter (you can also see that in the korean example in 1.). Because there is no normal use for teh space character in Chinese language it makes totally sense to just use it to delimit spoken phrases and thus the translator should also without fault realise that in Chinese a space character delimits a meaningful chunk of text. This one is probably the least harmful of all I talked about, but also the most annoying one, because I have to go through a given text I want to translate and have to replace each space with a newline (well, of course I know VIM, but many people don't). That is all I found up to this day. Please don't let this imply that I don't like the translation tools you offer. I love the translator and use it on a daily basis (I probably spend more hours in the translator then in Eclipse, but don't tell my boss ;)). I just wanted to tell you some possible directions for improvement and requirements somebody has, who uses your tools a lot. kind Regards Erik Bernoth PS: Can the translator or another tool be used to improve my English spelling and gramar as I use the translator to improve my Chinese capabilities? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-translate-general/-/ukbOoASwgRwJ. 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.
