Irish Translation Forum

Why is it when I translate something from English to Irish, it gives me a horrible translation? But when I translate the exact same thing from Irish into English, it does it right?

I'm guessing for the same reason it's easier for many of us to translate Irish->English than the other way around... the Google engineers are more comfortable with English so they have better algorithms to make sure the English text comes out properly.

I think that means they could use more Irish speakers on staff

David

I wouldn't bet on it - I've tried out www.systranet.fr on the Lexilogos site, translating whole phrases between French and Italian and the result is a disaster. That's automated translation and it shows. It's something I've always said to my French students - non seulement on parle une autre langue, mais on parle autrement dans cette langue - not only do we speak another language, but we speak differently in that language. QED
By the way, you might like to have a look (and scroll down) their web page on Gaélique irlandais -
www.lexilogos.com/gaelique_irlandais_dictionnaire.htm

Franc, tá an ceart agat! I like your quote.

Fíor dhuit a Franc

Eoin wrote:Franc, tá an ceart agat! I like your quote.

Me too...

I guess that means automatic translations can't reflect the contextual information we humans carry around about the real-world use of language. But still, I don't think there's any reason a computer translation program couldn't give technically correct answers - it's just requires a lot of time being put into it. Like you said, franc, every language is different and needs its own individual algorithms, and the fact is (I bet) that Google puts a lot more time into English than any other language, which explains why their translations into English come out sounding more reasonable than into other languages.

David

I'm working in the area of localisation right now. There's a lot of talk in that arena about machine translations and human translations. It seems like in order to keep costs down in continually translating in real-time a corporation's text needs (news, blogs, manuals), a lot of emphasis is being placed on machine translation. People are saying that 5 years ago it was far away, but these days some machine translations are good enough to begin with an automated translation, and then getting a human to touch it up. Google is but one of these machine translators, so maybe the enterprise translators for the 'big' languages are better than what we're seeing.

BridMhor wrote:

wdsci wrote:...which explains why their translations into English come out sounding more reasonable than into other languages.

Their Icelandic translations are even worse than the Irish ones.
But the English, French, German, etc the common languages are not too bad at all.

I use it to check out what my foreign friends on Facebook are saying.

You speak Icelandic

Hmmm..their French ones are okay, but they rarely use "tu", it's always "vous" , and after being in France for a few months, i know how odd people think it is to have the wrong wrod used with them. It's pretty bad when it comes to the imperative forms, good with noun genders though.