Machine translators are of no use to you as a learner. DeepL is great as a tool for people who do not understand Japanese to get their message across in the language and vice versa, but it cannot be your teacher because it can’t reliably correct or explain the text you give it.
Get corrected by humans: HiNative, LangCorrect, iTalki, HelloTalk, the subreddit’s Discord… There are lots of placed you can go to get corrections.
What it returns ranges from a perfect translation that makes it feel like it truly understands how to phrase things idiomatically in both languages, to a sentence that has nothing to do with the original at all. It’s more often closer to the former than to the latter.
It obviously becomes progressively worse when it needs to fill in things from context it cannot.
As a test I put in something in something in front of me:
> Yuri-girl Yashiro Nonoyama is reunited with her first love, Mikoto Saionji. However, Mikoto’s true identity is a “man” with a feminized face! Furthermore, Mikoto has a weakness for Yashiro and forces him to kiss her every day…? A forbidden love story begins! In addition, the electronic version includes a free synopsis manga and a Shonen Ace business trip manga! Don’t miss it!
Critiquing the translation:
– “man” should be “boy”; Deepl can’t do this – “feminized face” is odd, but I don’t know what I would do either – “Mikoto has a weakness for Yashiro” is simply wrong and should more so be “has a way to extort Yashiro” or something similar – “forces him to kiss her” should be “forces her to kiss him”. Deepl will fail this part often
Let’s try another one of another thing I have open:
> Every woman has a crush on her “younger boyfriend!” We feel that we would like to have a relationship with a pampered and cute younger boyfriend at least once.
> However, because of the age difference, it is sometimes difficult to meet someone younger than your age. That is why many of you may want to know the secret to meeting and dating a younger boyfriend.
> In this article, we introduce how to get a younger boyfriend, along with stories from 100 women who have experienced the same thing.
Critiquing it again:
– “has a crush on her younger boyfriend” should be “dreams of having a younger boyfriend” or something similar – “pampered” as a translation for “甘えん坊” makes no sense, but this word is notoriously difficult to translate. – “we feel that we would” isn’t wrong, but I don’t know where it comes from either, I would just do “and feels that …” – “However, because of the age difference, it is sometimes difficult to meet someone younger than your age.”… I’m really interested how it came up with this part since it’s extremely liberal… yet accurate. What it more literally says is “however, because of the younger differences in age, unlike peers of the same age, they aren’t quite blessed with meeting them”. I’m honestly impressed with how it reworded it there. – “along with the stories”… unless it know something I don’t and this is an alternative meaning, it simply means “by means of the stories”, not “along with”
This is about what one can expect from DeepL. It made some mistakes in some cases, feeding it shorter sentences with no context will sometimes produce something entirely unrelated to the original.
It’s good as in “wow, it’s a sentence! Google translate couldn’t do that a decade ago!”. It’s nowhere near the level you can consider it an aid to learning, especially when, as u/Hazzat has listed, there are bunch of easily accessible alternatives, some of them free to use.
It’s error prone, if you’re using it for learning, Jp > En can point you in the right direction.
When sentences are intricate and also author’s style, I tell you it f up royally. Second, always try to read more than the lines provides, for the context based language jp is. It’s not as perfect but might help for beginner stuff.
I don’t rely on DeepL as a sole source translator, but it is invaluable as an aid to my own translation. There are many times that DeepL can crack the “nut” of a difficult sentence’s grammar and vocabulary better than I can to yield its underlying logic. There are also many times when DeepL can yield a more graceful or idiomatic English rendering of a Japanese text than I can. But as others have pointed out, it also makes many simple mistakes that even a beginning translator could and should catch.
I do not use it for learning, I use it to understand things which I have zero chance of understanding without external help.
It seems significantly better than google translator, many of google’s translations make no sense and get better result of deepl.
Learning I would not use it as I think none of the AIs are good enough to base learning on it.
It’s no magic tool, but it’s definitely better than Google Translate, that much I can tell you..
When I was taking classes and had to write essays regularly I would usually write my essay, then paste it into deepL and translate it into English to see if what I wrote was even remotely gramattically correct. Then I would look at were the machine did not translate correctly and decide if deepL was wrong or if I made a mistake and rewrote the passage until even the dumb machine was able to make sense of my writing.
It was like getting the essay back form the teacher with red marks all over it and having to make sense to why the marks are there. Very helpful to understand my own mistakes actually.
It’s useful when investigating some Japanese you don’t understand – but it is not to be relied upon and should definitely **not** be used as an authoritative source. Always cross check results elsewhere. It’s main use for me is to get pointers to further investigation (similarly for Google translate).
It’s 10x better than Google TL. But even if it gives you seemingly convicing results, you should take everything with a grain of salt
Thank you for all the comments When I can understand English, I feel like I’ve become a special person, and I feel good. From now on, I would like to try American dramas like The Walking Dead and stand-up comedy. Please call me Pirate King from now on
ML Engineer here. Deep learning requires lots and lots of good examples for natural language processing. Translation to Japanese is particularly hard because it’s often not explicit and usually extremely context-dependent. Understanding context is something that neural networks don’t really do. They can emulate context comprehension but only if they have many, many *many* good examples to learn from. ChatGPT is a good example of a network that does this well.
For translations of long, descriptive sentences, I would say that it probably performs well. For short sentences, I’m sure the performance is often poor, particularly for Japanese since so much depends on prior knowledge.
13 comments
Machine translators are of no use to you as a learner. DeepL is great as a tool for people who do not understand Japanese to get their message across in the language and vice versa, but it cannot be your teacher because it can’t reliably correct or explain the text you give it.
Get corrected by humans: HiNative, LangCorrect, iTalki, HelloTalk, the subreddit’s Discord… There are lots of placed you can go to get corrections.
What it returns ranges from a perfect translation that makes it feel like it truly understands how to phrase things idiomatically in both languages, to a sentence that has nothing to do with the original at all. It’s more often closer to the former than to the latter.
It obviously becomes progressively worse when it needs to fill in things from context it cannot.
As a test I put in something in something in front of me:
> 百合娘な野々山やしろが再会した初恋の少女・西園寺みこと…。だが、みことの正体は顔つきが女性化しただけの“男”だった!? さらにみことは、やしろの弱みを握ると、毎日キスすることを強制してきて…!? 禁断の恋愛物語開幕！ さらに、電子版ではフリーダムなあらすじ漫画や少年エース出張漫画も収録！お見逃しなく☆
to:
> Yuri-girl Yashiro Nonoyama is reunited with her first love, Mikoto Saionji. However, Mikoto’s true identity is a “man” with a feminized face! Furthermore, Mikoto has a weakness for Yashiro and forces him to kiss her every day…? A forbidden love story begins! In addition, the electronic version includes a free synopsis manga and a Shonen Ace business trip manga! Don’t miss it!
Critiquing the translation:
– “man” should be “boy”; Deepl can’t do this
– “feminized face” is odd, but I don’t know what I would do either
– “Mikoto has a weakness for Yashiro” is simply wrong and should more so be “has a way to extort Yashiro” or something similar
– “forces him to kiss her” should be “forces her to kiss him”. Deepl will fail this part often
Let’s try another one of another thing I have open:
> 女性なら誰しも「年下彼氏」に憧れを抱くことがありますよね！甘えん坊で可愛い年下彼氏と一度は付き合ってみたいと感じるものです。
> ただ、年下という年齢の差があるからこそ、同年代とは異なり中々出会いに恵まれないことも。だからこそ、年下彼氏と出会う秘訣や交際する方法を知りたい方も多いのではないでしょうか？
> この記事では、同じ経験を持つ女性100人による年下彼氏の作り方を体験談と共にご紹介しています。
to
> Every woman has a crush on her “younger boyfriend!” We feel that we would like to have a relationship with a pampered and cute younger boyfriend at least once.
> However, because of the age difference, it is sometimes difficult to meet someone younger than your age. That is why many of you may want to know the secret to meeting and dating a younger boyfriend.
> In this article, we introduce how to get a younger boyfriend, along with stories from 100 women who have experienced the same thing.
Critiquing it again:
– “has a crush on her younger boyfriend” should be “dreams of having a younger boyfriend” or something similar
– “pampered” as a translation for “甘えん坊” makes no sense, but this word is notoriously difficult to translate.
– “we feel that we would” isn’t wrong, but I don’t know where it comes from either, I would just do “and feels that …”
– “However, because of the age difference, it is sometimes difficult to meet someone younger than your age.”… I’m really interested how it came up with this part since it’s extremely liberal… yet accurate. What it more literally says is “however, because of the younger differences in age, unlike peers of the same age, they aren’t quite blessed with meeting them”. I’m honestly impressed with how it reworded it there.
– “along with the stories”… unless it know something I don’t and this is an alternative meaning, it simply means “by means of the stories”, not “along with”
This is about what one can expect from DeepL. It made some mistakes in some cases, feeding it shorter sentences with no context will sometimes produce something entirely unrelated to the original.
It’s good as in “wow, it’s a sentence! Google translate couldn’t do that a decade ago!”.
It’s nowhere near the level you can consider it an aid to learning, especially when, as u/Hazzat has listed, there are bunch of easily accessible alternatives, some of them free to use.
It’s error prone, if you’re using it for learning, Jp > En can point you in the right direction.
When sentences are intricate and also author’s style, I tell you it f up royally. Second, always try to read more than the lines provides, for the context based language jp is. It’s not as perfect but might help for beginner stuff.
I don’t rely on DeepL as a sole source translator, but it is invaluable as an aid to my own translation. There are many times that DeepL can crack the “nut” of a difficult sentence’s grammar and vocabulary better than I can to yield its underlying logic. There are also many times when DeepL can yield a more graceful or idiomatic English rendering of a Japanese text than I can. But as others have pointed out, it also makes many simple mistakes that even a beginning translator could and should catch.
I do not use it for learning, I use it to understand things which I have zero chance of understanding without external help.
It seems significantly better than google translator, many of google’s translations make no sense and get better result of deepl.
Learning I would not use it as I think none of the AIs are good enough to base learning on it.
It’s no magic tool, but it’s definitely better than Google Translate, that much I can tell you..
When I was taking classes and had to write essays regularly I would usually write my essay, then paste it into deepL and translate it into English to see if what I wrote was even remotely gramattically correct. Then I would look at were the machine did not translate correctly and decide if deepL was wrong or if I made a mistake and rewrote the passage until even the dumb machine was able to make sense of my writing.
It was like getting the essay back form the teacher with red marks all over it and having to make sense to why the marks are there. Very helpful to understand my own mistakes actually.
It’s useful when investigating some Japanese you don’t understand – but it is not to be relied upon and should definitely **not** be used as an authoritative source. Always cross check results elsewhere. It’s main use for me is to get pointers to further investigation (similarly for Google translate).
It’s 10x better than Google TL.
But even if it gives you seemingly convicing results, you should take everything with a grain of salt
Thank you for all the comments
When I can understand English, I feel like I’ve become a special person, and I feel good.
From now on, I would like to try American dramas like The Walking Dead and stand-up comedy.
Please call me Pirate King from now on
ML Engineer here. Deep learning requires lots and lots of good examples for natural language processing. Translation to Japanese is particularly hard because it’s often not explicit and usually extremely context-dependent. Understanding context is something that neural networks don’t really do. They can emulate context comprehension but only if they have many, many *many* good examples to learn from. ChatGPT is a good example of a network that does this well.
For translations of long, descriptive sentences, I would say that it probably performs well. For short sentences, I’m sure the performance is often poor, particularly for Japanese since so much depends on prior knowledge.