[mojuba]

> although Google Translate is extremely useful (and I use it all the time), it is true that it does not usually match the skills of the best human translators

I think it is safe to say that Google Translate almost never macthes the skills of human translators except for rare trivial cases. As a rule it's rubbish, and sometimes as an exception it can be OK. Nobody argues against its usefulness, especially considering it's free and that it's pretty much the only tool we all use to understand things written in other languages. Better than nothing for sure.

Further, the whole analogy with flying and birds completely misses the point. Airplanes do satisfactory job at transporting humans and cargo, they are not required to fly like birds or mate with birds. We have invented what seems to be a more efficient method of flying using engines rather than flapping. All in all, airplanes are not birds and were never meant to be.

Similarly, in my view the arguments regarding machine translation come down to two things today: firstly whether it's useful or not, and secondly wether ML improves translation or not. My answers are: (1) weeeell, yeah, it's kinda useful in a better-than-nothing kind of a way and (2) doesn't seem like a significant improvement to me, if at all.

[vadimberman]

> I think it is safe to say that Google Translate almost never macthes the skills of human translators except for rare trivial cases. As a rule it's rubbish, and sometimes as an exception it can be OK.

Depends on the language pair. Depends on the human translator. I met translators who wouldn't compete against 1990s Babelfish / SYSTRAN well. They still had some business.

[mojuba]

I think it is unfair and even wrong to compare GT to the job of professional real time translation, because the latter is probably one of the most challanging jobs that I know of, next to astronauts and film stuntmen. Instead, what we mean most of the time is "this piece of text in the language I speak fluently that came out of Google Trabslate reads like nonsense to me, but I kinda get it (though sometimes I don't)". Meaning, it's way below my standards of quality for a language I know very well.

[icebraining]

Who said anything about real time?

[pjc50]

Google translate has lots of disadvantages but it is at least fast. Professional written translators manage a few tens of words a minute; professional simultaneous translators manage to keep up most of the time but are occasionally defeated by languages with very different sentence structures, and require frequent breaks.