yeah, i hate google translate...my boyfriend found his biological family in central america last year, and since he has a language disability that makes it difficult for him to learn new languages (not thanks to his white adoptive parents who never encouraged him) and he's been using it even though it's not that good...it's discouraging when some of his relatives tell me they don't understand him :( i do my best to help him, but it's exhausting (english and spanish are my third language, and i'm only good with reading, writing drives me nuts)
What's odd to me is how it doesn't seem to be a fundamentally difficult problem to solve, at least from the standpoint of Chinese.
Instead of translating single characters out of context, using broader chunks when translating and doing some tests for sense seem pretty straightforward.
你干嘛 is pretty much never used to say "you are dry!" and almost always used as 'what are you doing‘, but a shitty translation tool would read it as the former. Google translate fortunately doesn't have a problem with short phrases like this, but spirals out of control with marginally more complicated sentences.
RE: world language teachers of ONTD?ishumyJune 30 2016, 15:17:45 UTC
I study translation (now doing my Master's, joy) and this topic is really fascinating. But honestly, at least as the field is going, I doubt we will ever be able to stop using human translators, or at least not until the field of artificial intelligence makes HUGE leaps.
Google translate is notoriously bad for English to Japanese translation. I used to use it in my courses to check some of my homework responses, but it's not something you can actually rely on to translate for you. It was helpful as a reference but not much more than that.
I've heard though that automating translation from English to Japanese is extremely difficult, which is why Duolingo has no plans to add an English to Japanese course. If anyone has any good resources though I'd love to hear about them.
My friend is now "fluent" in Japanese, but this was after 10 years of taking classes, self teaching through audio books, and living there for three years. Granted, she became fluent before a lot of these new language-learning tools came out, but she said that unless you find a Japanese skype buddy, or actually go live there, it is very difficult to progress beyond a weaboo-level comprehension of the language.
I don't mean to discourage you! But I think it is very difficult to self-teach a language that is so different from one's mother tongue.
I know Google Translate is not perfect, but it always amazes me when it gets something wrong in a "major" language (German, French, Spanish), and in particular when it is something simple. I understand how it could mess up a whole paragraph, or a long sentence from a journal article (I have to admit, when I took archaeology courses, I would use google translate to speed up the reading of old, untranslated German and French works), but sometimes it can't even get simple phrases down.
I was just trying to translate stuff from Uzbek, and I gave up, it was useless.
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idk why i rambled, sorry.
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Instead of translating single characters out of context, using broader chunks when translating and doing some tests for sense seem pretty straightforward.
你干嘛 is pretty much never used to say "you are dry!" and almost always used as 'what are you doing‘, but a shitty translation tool would read it as the former. Google translate fortunately doesn't have a problem with short phrases like this, but spirals out of control with marginally more complicated sentences.
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I've heard though that automating translation from English to Japanese is extremely difficult, which is why Duolingo has no plans to add an English to Japanese course. If anyone has any good resources though I'd love to hear about them.
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I don't mean to discourage you! But I think it is very difficult to self-teach a language that is so different from one's mother tongue.
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I was just trying to translate stuff from Uzbek, and I gave up, it was useless.
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