Why has Google Translate become so bad? | Hacker News Reader

Why has Google Translate become so bad?

4 pointsthiht4 comments

For the past year, I've noticed Google Translate becoming worse and worse. Every single time I search for what I know is a false friend, Google Translate systematically returns the obviously wrong translation.

The last examples I have are the followings:

- I searched "faux-ami" in English, and Google Translate returned "fake friend" instead of "false friend"

- I searched "en deux temps", knowing that "in two times" was not correct, and it obviously returned the wrong translation again.

All of this while proudly displaying a "Validated by contributors" badge with a shield.

I don't remember Google Translate being so bad in the past, what has happened? It has switched from a reliable translator for phrases and idioms to an unusable piece of garbage. Do we have insights on this?

Have you tried it with whole sentences, rather than isolated phrases? For example, the translation of:

La Commission a donc réexaminé la question et a décidé d'adopter une nouvelle approche en deux temps.

is given as:

The Commission therefore re-examined the matter and decided to adopt a new two-step approach.

Similarly, "fake friend" is a valid translation of "faux ami". Real-world example from the Web: "Ton partenaire te poignarde dans le dos et un faux ami ne t'aide que dans son propre intérêt." When I translate "Les mots "embrasser" et "embrace" sont faux amis." it gives me 'The words "embrasser" and "embrace" are false friends.'

It may be that the idiomatic translation would be a more appropriate guess with no other context, but really that's a job for a dictionary rather than a translator, and it really should give both. The more context you give it, the more likely it is to make the right guess.

A lot of translation IP has emerged and Google may have been getting lawyers letter and degrading it's translations instead of paying $$

I can confirm same experience. It went backwards over time. Maybe some AI/ML "cleverness" V2. /rant

I know their Spanish translation has become very poor, I've been using DeepL as alternative for some time now.

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