OSDev.org

Context fixes a lot, and figures of speech such as "should feel bad" don't feel like they make proper direct translations. (nor do I know for sure if "sollte sich schämen" would be better - I hardly know anything beyond schoolbook German) At least translate.google.de exists and calls itself "Google Übersetzer" with the capital and without n.

Google's translation between English and German is still relatively fine, but with Estonian it's just horrible. With German, one can still understand the meaning of the text, even though it has errors. With Estonian, it's hard to understand anything.

With Irish I had the experience that it tends to gets confused by negations and often ends up saying the exact opposite of the original meaning... (Well, if any meaning is left.)

Curiously, with Finnish it's frequently quite usable. Perhaps it has to do with the volume of available source materials. (Google Translate's internals are supposed to be based on automated machine learning, as I recall.)

Indeed, that's why you can suggest a new / better translation.

I know an older man who uses Google Translator for whole web pages. He does not understand English but now he is able to read English texts quite well. Of course, the translation is not perfect. I just tested it here and the end result was surprisingly good!

That is indeed surprisingly well translated. Definitely would be able to follow the gist of the conversation. Although as surprising are perhaps the remaining defects; I suppose that is due to the automation, i.e., if they were to get some human resources involved to clean up the rough edges, it could probably be made close to perfect.

Well, I don't read German (or Estonian for that matter), or even speak either one. Working through Google translate was too much a pain in the @$$ -- I just don't have the patience.

Now, with that said, I can get enough out of this thread to know that no one really wants to see this auto-delete. Since it has been 2 days, I thought I would give the thread a little nudge to help you all along.

Danke, eryjus.


Isn't that the bare minimum for a translator? For "surprisingly well" I wouldn't expect only that you can understand the gist, but that it actually produces a grammatically valid sentence or perhaps even chooses a valid translation for every single word.

Those would be high standards, particularly with regards to Finnish. In my view, the minimum viable product is simply that the resulting translation be useful. For Finnish, Google are now beyond that minimum, approaching syntactically valid sentences and semantically accurate translation. The quality still lags behind e.g. French/English translation, but it works "surprisingly well" as compared to other machine translation efforts for Finnish that I've encountered in the past 20+ years.

I'd have to learn some Finnish before I could tell anything about the usual quality of translators there. But if the standard there is really on a level such low that you don't even get the gist of a text - and if you do, it's a pleasant surprise - then what use is the average automated translation at all?

Try to translate some Finnish or Estonian text to German It's really hard to understand... When I tried it for the first time, I just stared at it and had no idea, what the author wanted to say.

That's kind of expected when you don't know the language.

Given a good dictionary and a good grammar, I suppose I would be able to write something reasonably understandable. The other way round is probably much harder.

Well, unfortunately Estonian doesn't work that way, it's so different from German that one cannot really translate literally, but actually has to think the sentence in Estonian, at least if one wants to do it properly. Also the other way round one needs to understand the sentence before one can translate it. Just a few examples:

juur = root, sõber = friend; sõbra juures = "in the root of a friend" = at a friend's home
kõrv = ear, maja = house; maja kõrval = "on the ear of a house" = next to a house
Kõht on tühi / täis. = "The stomach is empty / full." = I am hungry / not hungry.

Yes, one can understand it, but it's a least confusing at first sight.

A good dictionary can probably help with this, but yes, I agree, idioms can be tricky (in any language).