Google Translate caught red handed: Chinese is translated to English, then to Japanese??

8 comments

1. Google Translate is not translating at all. It is searching for snippets of parallel text in known translations. As it was seeded with the official proceedings of the UN (which is a huge collection of texts simultaneously in all official languages – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish), any pair where both are not on this list has to contend with a much smaller corpus, and yes, often goes through English instead – since English-<any language> is the most translated pair (both ways) for almost all values of <any language>.

2. When we say “use Google Translate with a grain of salt”, we’re not joking. It’s embarrassing that in 2023 it’s still this bad, but I expect that things *might* be different by the end of the decade, what with all the improvements in AI and all that.

3. This isn’t really the point of the original post, but I just wanted to mention that I’d recommend DeepL for electronic japanese to english and vice versa translations.. It’s pretty good and seems to get things right a lot more than google translate.. though honestly most general translation software seems to be kind of bad at translating japanese…

4. I feel like everything is translated like this, tbh

5. Google translate can be a bit of an atrocity. I’d strongly recommend using deepl.com (with correct punctuation) or chatgpt, I’ve found them a lot more reliable, albeit no machine translator will give you all context or completely accurate translations every time

6. > Is Google translate really just first translating to English

   it took you this many years to figure it out? lmao

7. It’s well known and publicly stated by Google that it goes through English if it not have a direct parallel corpus between two languages.

8. [DeepL does the same thing](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/739743383127457803/1106839878479663164/IMG_9733.png)