[joe_the_user]

Whenever I attempt to use a translate site to translate more than a paragraph (Facebook or Google), it comes out a garbled mess - doesn't mean some sentences are seemingly clear and meaningful. The big thing is it chokes on idioms, not understanding, not leaving them as is but guessing some clearly wrong meaning. I occasionally find single-sentence posts on Facebook apparently translated astonishingly well, in the sense of being literate English and seeming to reflect the original meaning. But my French or Spanish is quite rough so translate could have missed something big - as I know it does when you get into longer texts.

[narag]

Cada vez que intento usar un sitio de traducción para traducir más de un párrafo (Facebook o Google), sale un lío confuso - no significa que algunas oraciones sean aparentemente claras y significativas. Lo importante es que se atraganta con los modismos, no entendiéndolos, no dejándolos como están, sino adivinando algún significado claramente erróneo. Ocasionalmente encuentro que las publicaciones de una sola oración en Facebook aparentemente traducen sorprendentemente bien, en el sentido de que son en inglés y parecen reflejar el significado original. Pero mi francés o español es bastante duro, así que traducir podría haber pasado por alto algo grande, como sé que sucede cuando se trata de textos más largos.

I'm a native and it seems almost good to me. "algunas oraciones no sean", OK. And "duro" should be "rudimentario", also "de qué son" lacks the accent. But the rest is acceptable and it's possible to get a decent translation, only modifying those bits.

http://www.DeepL.com/Translator

[joe_the_user]

Oh, that just means I happen to write in clear, unidiomatic English ;-). Add just a smidgen of irregular usage, contemporary metaphors and such and things can go South pretty quickly.

[barrkel]

That'll just be a training problem (often translation is driven from example texts that have lots of translations, and we have many of these for multi-national orgs like EU, which necessarily don't include a lot of colloquialisms), and the inconsistency isn't found because the models built don't extend all the way out to real world experiences (training) and recognizing text as a real world experience narrative. I think a much deeper network could do better but we don't know how to train them, we take way too long as it is.

[narag]

I've seen the evolution of translators and there is a big difference in results. We can try more convoluted examples.

Also do you think that every human can parse that contemporary metaphors better?