Google Translate Boasts Near-Human Accuracy Levels With New Neural Network-Powered System

[Lucian Armasu]

Google announced its new Google Neural Machine Translation system for Google Translate, which reduces errors by 55-85% for several language pairs, achieving almost human level performance.

Google Translate Boasts Near-Human Accuracy Levels With New Neural Network-Powered System : Read more

 

[Christopher1]

For most languages. Japanese it still barfs on big time.

 

[omegashock]

Chinese to English is STILL horrifyingly bad. That graph is COMPLETELY misleading.

 

[Deleted member 1353997]

I can see this work well on perfect sentences, but...

"duzzit wurk wiz dis kinda text too? Prolly not, huh?"

The reason why humans do better translations: they actually understand what they're reading.


PS: I just copy-pasted this entire comment into Google Translate. Either they still aren't using that fancy new GNMT tech, or their definition of "near-human accuracy" is extremely arbitrary.

Broken English aside, the English -> French translation wasn't too bad, but nowhere close to human translation quality.

 

[WyomingKnott]

How can they determine the accuracy of human translation at less than 100%? Who compares the original to the result?

Or do they translate A to B and then have another human translate back, and check against the original?

 

[tamalero]

For most languages. Japanese it still barfs on big time.

Exactly what I was going to say.

 

[alidan]

How can they determine the accuracy of human translation at less than 100%? Who compares the original to the result?

Or do they translate A to B and then have another human translate back, and check against the original?

Not sure how they do it, but I would get someone who I able to fluently speak 2 languages, have them read and understand both texts, and rate how much they though was lost in the translation.

 

[OneFai]

It is still really bad. I just tried to translate "Coming back home around Chinese new year". It got translated into "Return home everywhere (possessive) China new year".

How's that good?

 

[Brian_R170]

My wife is a professional freelance translator. She is frequently hired to edit and proofread machine translations from Google translate. I don't know what kind of scale they are using to rate the quality of their translations, but is sure looks misleading. The only time their translations are reasonable is when the source text kindergarten-level reading material.

 

[Sarah89]

That's too good to be true! Google translate works but works well only with a few languages. It works awfully with Dutch. Personally, I keep the connection with a translation service: https://www.translateshark.com/dutch.html It helps me with the foreign e-mails, that Google translate not clear.
I don't observe the changes in translation to Dutch now but I'll use Google if they really change the translation system.