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Comment by toxik | Hacker News Reader

Google Translate is state of the art, so I’m not sure why that would be surprising. That said, is there something wrong with the translations offered?

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> Google Translate is state of the art

For French/English/German, DeepL is much better IME.

> That said, is there something wrong with the translations offered?

I think in French hello = "bonjour" and hi = "salut"... not sure where "bonjours" and "salutations" came from.

The Italian "auguri" means "best wishes"; "chiamatemi" means "call me". Neither is a plausible translation of "hello". The obvious one, "ciao", is missing.

I thought Hello was invented with the telephone. Prior to that, English greetings were good morning/evening. What do Italians and French say when they pick up the phone? Allora?

"Bonjours" doesn't exist, and "salutations" is a tad quirky, but OK in informal settings, especially when addressing many people at once.

No, bonjours exists (it's simply the plural form of bonjour used as a noun) but the contexts it is used are very very infrequent so it's weird to find it in that list.

Compare "I said my hellos and goodbyes." in English. It's definitely a word, just so uncommon as to be largely irrelevant in most practical contexts.

It's very clearly semantically related though? I don't understand the complaint here.

It seems to be a very domain specific solution, they are trying to present versions of words in customer requested domain names if already taken.

Like you type in “stargazer. com”, system sees it’s already registered, and returns a “sorry sir it’s taken” page, with similar words listed as “but maybe try these words: astronomer, observatory, telescope, shooting star...”.

So it’s not serious translation, more of an inexpensive quick dictionary search. I guess it’s okay for its intended purposes.

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