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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

I sell things on Amazon European platforms (UK FR DE ES IT) and they receive reviews.

I only speak English and French and therefore for all other languages I try to understand the reviews using Google Translate.

The result is never good. Sometimes it's barely intelligible; many times it's not really. (For some reason, GT is incapable of translating Italian; by which I mean: the resulting translation gives you no idea whatsoever about the original meaning.)

It really makes one wonder if the hype/fear about AI is maybe misplaced.

Google is a self-described "AI company", with all the money in the world, and staffed with the best people, and access to the most data, and this is all they can come up with?

The only explanation is that the problem is simply too hard.

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It already works very well, especially after its improvement in the recent years after using neural networks. I've frequently been surprised by the quality of the translation it provides to Japanese sentences, not to mention between German and English. The test cases I put in in some other languages (e.g. Chinese) are really promising too.

Machine translation is a really hard problem. The messiness of language as a system, the importance of context in daily conversation etc. all play a part. Another layer of complexity is the gap between everyday usage and official, written form, which is also being tackled by researchers. You have to put this thing into perspective. Many of the old rule-based/Chomskyan software have been simply unusable for decades. New statistical approaches have been in use for barely 10 years, and industrial deep learning less than half a decade. There are still much more to come. The hype IMO is well justified.

> It already works very well

Well, that's really not my experience, nor is it the experience of the author of the article. The examples given in the article speak for themselves, really.

Really? I was actually surprised of how well Google translates Italian in most cases (I'm Italian).

Most of the times, I encounter major translation issues when the original sentence is barely intelligible in the original language. Other times there's a small mistake which could be understood by context in the original language but it's completely lost once translated — like it happens when you try to translate jokes and puns or when you miss a comma.

People generally don't write correctly, so Google needs a lot of luck to understand that "Let's eat grandma!" doesn't actually translate to "Mangiamo la nonna"

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I translated this whole comment for the sake of it and the result is extremely good. Not completely natural but well beyond understandable.

I translate FROM Italian, not to it, and, well, most of the times, I don't understand the result.

(It's likely Google Translate is better at going from English to another language, since it seems it uses English as a pivot. In fact that's how I use it if I want to write something in, say, German; I write in English, and check the French translation, and rephrase and rephrase, and don't accept the German version until the French translation is acceptable).

Going back to Italian, here's a small example: Non potevano dirlo solo gli adulti?, which really means, I think, "Isn't it something only adults would say?" is translated by Google in English as:

Could not only adults tell it?

which doesn't seem to mean anything, and in French as:

Les adultes ne pourraient-ils pas le dire?

which means something, but a different thing from the English translation, and, I think, not the correct interpretation of the original Italian one.

Do you happen to sell slippers?

Maybe the problem is not too hard, just that statistical models are not the right way to solve it. Actually it seems like it's THE problem that exemplifies the difference between partial problems that are suitable for stats (bayesian spam filters) and the "true" AI.

Also using English as an intermediate step is a no-no. I doubt anything will improve while there isn't a competitor that tries a fresh approach and gets better results.

> Do you happen to sell slippers?

Not at all, why? Do you need any? ;-) Or is it a known difficult term to translate?

Both.

It's a kind of shoe in Spain forty years ago. Also the word might be getting obsolete, so yes difficult to source:

https://www.calzadoslobo.com/tienda/bambas/bamba-de-lona-con...

There was a time when a lot of people in the irc added an "x" to their nicks in the fashion of unix, linux, aix, hp-ux... I can't help to make the association every time :)

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