Google mistranslates the word because it uses English as a medium(probs).

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• remon@ani.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  If you say so.

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  • glimse@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    They don’t. OP just bulk reposts other people’s complaints. Talk about mildlyinfuriating

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    • remon@ani.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I was just pointing out that I (and probably most lemmy users) have to take OPs word for there actually being a mistranslation in the picture.

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  • starlinguk@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    You notice it when you look at international instructions on packets of food. The non-English texts have a distinct English vibe.

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    • sfxrlz@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Or Microsoft documentation pages which are all sloppily translated by ai without proofreading

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• foggy@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The middle language is not a spoken language. It’s AI created an intermediary language to translate between all languages. It’s not written/spoken, it’s done on weights. It’s referred to as an ‘interlingua’

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  • balsoft@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    In my experience, with the amount of mistakes similar to the one in the OP, I strongly suspect that language is somehow unbelievably close (semantically) to English then.

    I decided to quickly experiment with two languages I somewhat know, and got 3/3 incorrect translations consistent with English as intermediary:

    • Russian ширинка (fly, meaning “zipper on your trousers”) -> Georgian ფრენა (to fly, as in “flight”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary
    • Russian парковаться (to park, as in “park your car”) -> Georgian პარკი (park, meaning “green space with trees”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary
    • Russia лежать (to lie, as in “lie on your back”) -> Georgian ტყუილი (lie, as meaning “untruth”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary

    It makes exactly the same mistakes if you translate from Russian to Spanish and French too.

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  • dreugeworst@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    you’d think they would use embeddings nowadays instead, with all the llm hype going on

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  • moonshine69@lemmy.nz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Very old article, they are absolutely just using llms nowdays

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• fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It’s the consequence of translation engines being trained on a corpus that is mainly Spanish and English. It needs a corpus of text of two languages to even attempt translation from A to B. If it doesn’t have enough, it will use bridge languages.

  How many texts are there both in Ukrainian and Japanese? Effectively none, so it makes perfect sense to use a bridge language.

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• JelleWho@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  For German Dutch is does seem to do it directly. But I think it mostly is because a person has put in the effort for it.

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  • gnutrino@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Doesn’t German -> Dutch basically involve just translating half the words to English and adding a silly accent though?

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    • starlinguk@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I wish. Love, Dutch person learning German.

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  • fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The way translation engines are trained is with a body of written text in two languages, which teaches the engine both both words translate and how they fit in equivalent semantic contests.

    Of course a person as put in effort, so has in every language. But that’s irrelevant if there isn’t a large body of text in both languages to learn from. I’m sure German and Dutch have a looooot of shared texts.

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• balsoft@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Yeah, in my experience it absolutely does translate everything via English. If you need to translate from Ukranian directly to other languages, ironically Yandex Translate is probably your best bet.

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  • gegil@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Are they? I know that its been that way years ago, but now with ai technology, it should be able to translate text not just by the word definition, but also context and conceptual meaning. At lest it is supposed to work this way if they used ai for actually useful stuff and not another slop generator.

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    • balsoft@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      it should be able to translate text not just by the word definition, but also context and conceptual meaning.

      It has been doing that at least since 2016, and it’s using LLM-adjacent tech (transformer + RNN) since 2020. The problem is that it still seems to be doing things via English, which is especially problematic for single words with no context. In this example, “зачиняти” means “to close”. Google translates it to English as simply “close”, which loses the context of which meaning or even part of speech it is. Google then translates it to Japanese, but since the context is lost it assumes that “close” means “near” rather than “block an opening” and translates it as “chikai”.

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