| This is something that needs to be repeated until everyone internalises it: for language pairs other than the "easy" ones Google translate sucks. I am Greek and translations from and to my language are utterly ridiculous, on the level of Bozo the clown doing the translation with his underpants on his head back to front. Typical example: I put in the Greek word for "swallow", the bird, and ask for the French translation. I get back the word "avaler" - the French word for "to swallow", the verb. That's my little benchmark there, useful because Google translate has been doing this consistently, for a good few years, before it used neural networks, before it started claiming its setup essentially constitutes an "interlingua" etc etc. Note that the bird and the verb sound nothing like each other in Greek, or French. They sound the same only in English, so GT goes from Greek to French through English. Because it doesn't have enough parallel texts to go directly to French. And so it sucks, because it doesn't have enough data. You can ask native users of other languages-that-are not-English or have few ish speakers, perhaps Turkish or Hungarian etc. I'm pretty sure you'll find out they have similar experiences. So I don't know what metric they use to evaluate their results, it doesn't seem to be a particularly good metric of translation quality. Maybe they just care more about how many people use their system and try to optimise for that, rather than going for the much harder to know quality. |