[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.