[midoridensha]

>As mentioned by GGP, the Google Translate app for Android (at least) allows you to download the model for a given language (pair?), after which you no longer need any kind of Internet connection to translate.

This isn't true. Google claims this, but it just doesn't work that way: I've had many, many cases of trying to translate stuff with a bad cellular data connection and it doesn't work, even though I have the language pack downloaded.

[em500]

I don't think offline translation kicks in automatically when you have a bad (as opposed to no) connection. You can easily verify that it can translate without any connection (both on iOS and Android) by downloading the language and putting the phone in airplane mode. (At least, the basic text translation works fine. The more advanced features, such as speech and image translation, don't.)

Also, Microsoft's Translator app can do the same (offline translation for text) and IME is about on par with Google).

[midoridensha]

>Also, Microsoft's Translator app can do the same (offline translation for text) and IME is about on par with Google)

Interesting, I'll have to try this.

Well, I tried installing the app and using image translate mode on some Japanese and the results were not very good, not nearly as good as Google Translate. I'll try it out later with regular text.

I also looked at the phrasebook feature. That's a pretty neat idea actually. However, for some really strange reason it defaulted to showing me phrases in Spanish. I have no idea why it thinks I would want to speak Spanish (My system language is English, and I live in Japan, so obviously I want to convert to Japanese. No one speaks Spanish here.)

[traceroute66]

> using image translate mode on some Japanese and the results were not very good,

I think the honest truth is that Japanese is the ultimate challenge of any translation too.

My Japanese friends tell me that DeepL is about as close as you will ever get to a passable translation quality.

But DeepL does not do image translation.

On a recent trip to Japan I installed six image translation apps on my phone.

None were perfect, I found Naver Papago to be the most consistently usable (although it was far from perfect).

Interesting observations I made during the extensive testing:

     1) The majority of image translation apps don't like Japanese when written vertically, I found they perform best with horizontally written Japanese.
     2) All image translation apps *REALLY* don't like hand-written Japanese.  Some of them *MIGHT* translate *SOME* of the text. But really all of them only really work consistently with machine-printed text.

[Scoundreller]

The other issue with deepl is that it has limited language pairs. I wonder what limits it. The language I'd like should have enough of a corpus of text.

[piskerpan]

That’s just bad programming. Turn on Airplane Mode and it will work. A bunch of apps won’t even try to use offline data when they’re “online”, even if the connection is 1 byte/second.

[hombre_fatal]

It’s not bad programming if the server has a bigger better model, thus gives better results, and the local model is just a lower quality but smaller portable model.

That said, let my give my HN 2c and say that Google Translate is pretty bad these days. It’s community/user adjustments, for example, are guaranteed to be bad. In Spanish, you instantly know you’re looking at a user “correction” because the translation has no accents. “como estas”. It’s bad in 100% of cases, every time I see that “user verified” symbol.

I think the offline model doesn’t have the user adjustments, but the offline model also seems to be lower quality. Back when I translated a lot, I used to know when my internet was offline mid session because of the difference in translation quality.

[piskerpan]

So I ask for a translation and it fails because it times out, giving me an error. And you call that good programming?

I get it that the server translations are better, but currently I’m not seeing any translation at all. You, Google Translate developer, should catch the error and show the offline translation instead.

[hombre_fatal]

Oh, I see. By “doesn’t work” I thought they (and you) just meant it still hits the server even though you have a model downloaded.

Yeah, on a spotty mobile connection, most services tend to be optimistic that it’s better to wait than to assume your internet is down. iOS online/offline callback is very optimistic, probably because for most services, trying something in a degraded 20b/s conn is better than giving up and going “sorry, no internet.” (Funnily enough, the iOS App Store gives up way too soon)

So I agree. I think the right thing to do is to do an instant translation with the local model, when available. Maybe a cherry on top is to see if the server has a better translation in the background.