Here is my website that will lead you to my Assignment 3 and introduce to you some of the many options for mobile translation options that exist now and I hope will continue to evolve into the future. Upon researching and reflection, there were many more translating technologies than I was even aware of.
I use some of these tools on a daily basis and was surprised to find that they are not always very accurate or appropriate in their translations. It was an eye-opening research experience and I hope that you find it interesting!
https://louisaagreen.wixsite.com/yaqoob—green-co
Hello Louisa,
A really thorough description, and as a freelance translator of several languages, I couldn’t agree more. Sometimes I have to look up a few words, especially when converting an audio file into a written document for legal work or child welfare documentation. Among the languages I speak, there are many words that can vary from state to state or city to city, making it occasionally very difficult to discover them using Google Translate. The challenges that translators are facing will be effectively addressed by this app.
Hi Louisa,
Thank you for raising a very important social topic of the effective translation tool. A lot of people rely on those not-perfect assistive devices in Canada. I have never studied this topic myself, and I am glad to know what is available on the market, the pros and cons of each tool, and your observations and recommendations. I use Google Translate for a second foreign language, and I can see it is not perfect, so I look forward to the day when I know enough lexical and grammatical units to say Good-by! to this assistance.
I once taught “Theory and Practice of Translation”, and I remember that there are so many approaches, methods, and techniques applicable to a certain translation unit that it is hard sometimes to make a choice. It usually takes some time to explain to students that translation is a creative and variable process, and there are no ready answers there.
I wonder how the authors of the translation devices made those morphological, lexical, syntactical, and stylistic choices as there are so many details at each level of the language. Well, they are brave people for sure!
Hi Louisa,
I really enjoyed reading your A3. You have brought up a very important aspect of translation apps. An incorrect translation might cause misunderstanding or embarrassment. Sometimes people are misunderstood even when they speak the same language. This happens because they might come from different areas or customs. This is something the translating app would not be able to notice or differentiate between people in order to clarify or come up with what the speakers “actually” mean. The solution is AI. According to the frequency of wrong translations, the Application should be able to come up with the correct translation when it gets it wrong several times. However, as not human translations, Google translate is a great improvement in machine translations but it is still not up to the level of accuracy you have mentioned.
It uses an intelligence system to translate the texts given
“Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) is a neural machine translation (NMT) system developed by Google and introduced in November 2016, that uses an artificial neural network to increase fluency and accuracy in Google Translate.” Wikipedia source.
Hi Louisa,
Very thorough job on translators. I agree that it would be lovely to have a universal translator that worked effectively based on the meaning of the sentence, rather than the actual words. I think that for a while, I saw YouTube ads for something that did that (whether it worked as advertised or not is another question). The videos of it in use seemed to be pretty reliable, and it was using Japanese as the language it was translating into. The videos for it were pretty convincing, but again, who knows for sure. I just wish I could remember the name of it.
I think that the first two post clearly outlined the great parts of your site, and I agree with both of them.
My personal experience is with Google translate only, and only for words, rather than sentences. For individual words, it seems to work well, but some of our international students have been able to let us know that full sentences or paragraphs often have laughable errors.
Hi Louise! Great A3 topic, I really enjoyed going through your website and the information on mobile translation applications. One that I have used before that was mind blowing to me is Google Home’s interpreter mode (https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9234753?hl=en) which has many languages that can be translated and is very close to real time. To translate conversations with interpreter mode, you can ask the Google Assistant to:
“…Be my Italian interpreter”
“…Interpret from Polish to Dutch”
“…Chinese interpreter”
“…Turn on interpreter mode” etc.
But I agree that there is still a lack of translating technology that can assist in casual situations, rather than just polite and formal ones. For example, my mother tongue is Tamil and most language translators are all quite formal. Considering intonation and the how culture can impact the language (the Tamil spoken in India is very different from the Tamil spoken in Sri Lanka), these differences and nuances in the language would also need to be addressed.
Hi Louisa! I like your A3 topic and learned a lot from exploring your website.
I can’t agree more with you that multiple mobile translation applications exist, but none have come close to accurate translation. My partner is Japanese, and my native language is Mandarin, but we can only communicate using English. We cannot explain something clearly in many situations in English, so we need to use translation apps. Then I found out the translation is either inaccurate or inappropriate most of the time. There was one time, google translate gave me “愛人 (Aijin)” for the translation of “lover” in Japanese. My partner was shocked when I called him 愛人 since it means mistress in Japanese, which is a very insulting word. I think the inaccurate translation may cause awkward misunderstandings between people who speak different native languages.
I really like that you listed the popular translation apps and briefly described them, as well as the comparison example between Google Translate and DeepL. I especially agree with your fourth point under the “what I would like to see” part because human languages change depending on situations and the closeness between the speakers. Having technologies that can provide instant and accurate translation in any language and situation will be great!
Hi Bingying,
Thank you for checking out my site and for such an interesting reply! I am sure that being in an international relationship, you can relate to the challenges of cross-cultural and linguistic communications between two people from different backgrounds and with different mother-tongues. My partner is from Pakistan and even though his English is pretty fluent, we still have miscommunications sometimes and we mostly speak in English! Japanese is a really tricky language so please don’t feel bad!! Pronunciation and grammar is quite easy but the kanji system and all various levels of formality are challenging. I also had a Japanese partner for several years and I used to say ‘Ai suru’ (I love you) but this was quite strange in Japanese because they normally just say ‘Dai suki desu’ (I really like you) which doesn’t sound very passionate or romantic to most foreigners! These subtle nuances are almost non-existent in any translation technology that I have seen so far and it will be very interesting to see, with the implementation of more sophisticated AI and deep Learning, what will happen as far as advances in the area of machine translation.