Most of the time new technology doesn’t mean much to me. Tell me that Microsoft has a new set of icons and I start snoring. Show me a fancy new laptop
[See the full post at: OK Google. Say where is the taxi stand in Portuguese.]
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OK Google. Say where is the taxi stand in Portuguese.
- This topic has 35 replies, 20 voices, and was last updated 5 years, 4 months ago.
AuthorViewing 18 reply threadsAuthor-
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True story. About a month ago a guy stopped by here to offer his landscaping services. He spoke broken english and I guess he felt I didn’t understand him well enough so he broke out his phone, said something in spanish and it came back something similar to “This will help translate”. I thought WOW that’s pretty cool. Then he said something else into his phone and it replied along the lines of “I can help you sexy lawn orgy”.
Took his card sent him on his way and threw the card in the trash.
4 users thanked author for this post.
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I say it’s about time! We are nearing the end of the 2nd decade of the 21st century. It’s about time something’s being done about the language problem. This could be the beginnings of the “universal translator” used in Star Trek.
Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's -
“…The Hitchhiker’s Babel fish is almost here.”
Lest we forget: “Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
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I’m Portuguese. Google always translates to Brazilian Portuguese and not to Portuguese of Portugal or European which is the mother country of this language ….. It’s not a Bus Stand (pt-br) but a Bus Stop (pt-pt)……
1 user thanked author for this post.
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No you’re not, I still have and use a flip phone.
Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's2 users thanked author for this post.
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Man, imagine all the telemetry and de-anonymized data collection Google gets to do with this!
Your literal voice print, precise location, sentiment analysis, the nature of your interests…. use it enough and they will have enough information to accurately impersonate your voice.
No thanks.
And to think, people lose their minds about Microsoft’s telemetry that collects comparatively benign stuff like “was there a delay when running the Start menu animation?” and “Is anyone actually still using Wordpad?”
11 users thanked author for this post.
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I could not agree more. It seems that we have waves of protestations of innocence on the matter from whatever tech giant is caught out on privacy … only to have that same giant exposed for yet another violation not long after. I have an Android phone but don’t use Assistant, nor would i ever have one of those Alexa things, or equivalent, in my home.
The thing that most infuriates me is that i seem to have to make the rounds of the various privacy options on my devices (Android, iPadOS, Windows) to ensure they are still set in my favor. Their manufacturers don’t seem to have a problem overriding my selections … but on what basis i cannot say. It might only be after major OS updates, but i cannot be certain.
The bottom line is that makers of hardware and software are not being honest and honorable about letting us make our own privacy choices.
1 user thanked author for this post.
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Man, imagine all the telemetry and de-anonymized data collection Google gets to do with this!
Your literal voice print, precise location, sentiment analysis, the nature of your interests…. use it enough and they will have enough information to accurately impersonate your voice.
No thanks.
And to think, people lose their minds about Microsoft’s telemetry that collects comparatively benign stuff like “was there a delay when running the Start menu animation?” and “Is anyone actually still using Wordpad?”
I don’t like the idea of forced telemetry on my PC that I can’t just shut off. I have no problem with it shipping on by default, just give me a toggle that disables it totally, that’s all I want. But I could not agree with you more about Google. I am still sort of surprised Woody is so in love with Google, arguably the worst anti-privacy company on the planet.
1 user thanked author for this post.
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RE NoScript
If you visit some sites that you REALLY want to use and trust them you can hit ‘Temporarily Allow all Scripts on This Page ” What is scary is some times you can do that 6, 7, 8 or more times before every thing is loaded. A half a dozen layers of redirection sucking in what ever.
Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.
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Google already offers a translation of words from one language to another simply by typing the word — or sentence –in a Google search using any commonly used browser (FF, WF, Safari, Chrome…)
I do that very often in my laptop from English to another language and vice versa, to and from a variety of languages; is it any different when googling something in a cell phone? Notice that the “laptop” query is made using text, not voice; that gets around the “voice print” and “sentiment analysis” mentioned earlier by warrenrumack. As to “location”, well… any Google search, I think, rats on you, including where you are when using Google to do your search, unless (maybe if) you prevent it by having “do not track” (or some equivalent option) selected in the browser setup.
Word of caution: sometimes you do not get the translation right away, but a series of “hits” to dictionary / translation sites instead. Also, the translation is not always “spot on”.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV1 user thanked author for this post.
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Just use Google and search for the single word translate. That brings up a form that lets you choose input and output languages as well as a microphone button to input the phrase as well as a speaker button to say the phrase in the language chosen. The initial Detect language option is usually sufficient.
For example type
Hasta la vista → Bye
This selects the input language as Spanish.
If you click the swap languages
button you’ll get:
Bye → Adiós
Click it again and you will get:
Adiós →Goodbye
Play with it a bit and you will find this English to Spanish translation:
so long → hasta la vista
The Spanish to German translation is interesting:
Hasta la vista → Bis später
Swapping languages gives:
Bis später → Hasta luegoHP Compaq 6000 Pro SFF PC / Windows 10 Pro / 22H2
Intel®Core™2 “Wolfdale” E8400 3.0 GHz / 8.00 GB
HP ProDesk 400 G5 SFF PC / Windows 11 Pro / 23H2
Intel®Core™ “Coffee Lake” i3-8100 3.6 GHz / 16.00 GB -
That little microphone icon is not there in my browser, what am I missing? Palemoon latest W10 Pro 1909
Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there. -
Google Chrome.
“Google Chrome is up to date
Version 79.0.3945.79 (Official Build) (64-bit)”That’s what I was using to produce what you see. I just tried the same thing using the latest version of Firefox. Neither microphone button appears there.
Back in Google Chrome, the colorful one’s hint says “Search by voice”. The gray one’s hint says “Translate by voice”. I tried neither as I do not wish to make my voice bio-metrics available to the world thru Google just as I do not provide that opportunity to Microsoft thru Cortana.
HP Compaq 6000 Pro SFF PC / Windows 10 Pro / 22H2
Intel®Core™2 “Wolfdale” E8400 3.0 GHz / 8.00 GB
HP ProDesk 400 G5 SFF PC / Windows 11 Pro / 23H2
Intel®Core™ “Coffee Lake” i3-8100 3.6 GHz / 16.00 GB3 users thanked author for this post.
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Well, I made this experiment with the “reverse” feature of “translate”: I asked it to translate a sentence in Latin to its English equivalent, then to reverse the order going back from the Latin translation to, presumably, the English original. I did a few such back-and-forth operations, one after another. After four of those, “Translate” went into a stable loop. The original English sentence was: “Here he rides his horse”, the end result after several back-and -forth was: “and horses”, going through some very curious transmogrifications of the sentence along the way.
So:”Tabinde ut Interpretari” (That, according to “Translate”, means “So much for Translate”)
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV1 user thanked author for this post.
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2 users thanked author for this post.
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Perhaps a bit of context would help. See “Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West by Isabelle S. Sayers”, page 58 (in the caption at the bottom of the page):
68. A stirring moment in any performance of the Wild West was Buffalo Bill’s entry into the arena; here he rides his horse Duke. (Montgomery Ward Ethnological Series stereograph; photocopy by Dolfinger)
HP Compaq 6000 Pro SFF PC / Windows 10 Pro / 22H2
Intel®Core™2 “Wolfdale” E8400 3.0 GHz / 8.00 GB
HP ProDesk 400 G5 SFF PC / Windows 11 Pro / 23H2
Intel®Core™ “Coffee Lake” i3-8100 3.6 GHz / 16.00 GB2 users thanked author for this post.
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I am not a public figure. I have no interest whatsoever in allowing Google to find yet another way to try and own me. I suppose Woody feels that the percentage of folks who place great value on privacy is too small consider.
I will continue to avoid ALL Google stuff (blocking all in my hosts file) and will continue to fight for privacy by deliberately buying only iPhones and smart watches, using browsers that care about privacy, and blocking all that I can in Windows that tries to deny me privacy. But this is NOT an ideal answer to the issue as Mitchell Baker points out in a recent interview with the Guardian.
1 user thanked author for this post.
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continue to fight for privacy by deliberately buying only iPhones and smart watches
Isn’t that like buying a Chromebook because you don’t like Microsoft’s telemetry?
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Welcome to the 21st Century. We may resist privacy incursion, but once those who compete with us for things, status, position, etc. throw caution to the wind and begin using more technology than we choose to use, then that technology becomes essential, we will have no choice.
At one point I told myself, I’ll never want a Smart Phone. Then I got a job where 2 factor authentication and intra-office chat and eMail and teleconferencing are a necessity. Guess what’s in my pocket now?
The other day my wife and I were on a walk… On a whim I woke up my smart phone and asked, “Hey Google, who was the actress in Jurassic Park II?” because I couldn’t think of Julianne Moore’s name. The answer came forth instantly verbally, augmented with photos.
Maybe we should worry less, delve in, become masters of the new tech, and not be left behind so quickly. So what if our life’s savings will be taken from us before we die? That was probably going to happen anyway.
-Noel
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I wonder what the feedback loop is for Google Translate?
I mean, if “Where’s the bathroom?” got changed in meaning to “Tell me how to get to the dump” in another language, and thereafter people just kept getting directed to Mount Trashmore just outside of town by shrugging and head-shaking locals, what process is in place to teach the translator that it’s made a subtle mistake?
-Noel
3 users thanked author for this post.
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The debate goes on whether technology is morally neutral or not but, IMHO, one reasonable middle way might just be that, in the end, albeit morally neutral in the end technology is used in service of people’s values – either in good or bad ways: warrenrumak’s concerns are as pertinent as Noel Carboni’s pragmatism is legitimate.
Back to the topic, Anon is right: Google translates to Brazilian Portuguese rather than European Portuguese (probably because Portugal has a population of 10 million people while Brazil population is over 200 million people).
As EyesOnWindows and OscarCP pointed out, subtle language differences between the two countries and back-and-forth translations often lead to confusing results (to make a comparison, consider the meaning of American English words and expressions such as “sneakers”,”second floor”,”in school” and the British English equivalents: “trainers”,”first floor”,”at school” – see where this is going?).
One small example: shoelaces. The Portuguese (pt-PT) word for it (“atacadores”) is “cardaços” in Brazil (pt-BR). An European Portuguese asking a native Brazilian “Como se apertam os atacadores?” [How do you put your shoelaces on?] will get a weird, slightly afraid look from the Brazilian dude: to him, that question sounds a bit more like “How do you press an attacker?” because the Portuguese expression “um atacante” (an attacker) has the same meaning in both countries (someone who is physically threatening you) but whereas in Portugal, the word “atacador” has one single meaning (a shoelace) in Brazil, it could also be a synonym of “atacante” (an attacker)… thus, unless the Brazilian guy actually faced an angry burglar armed not with a gun but with a pair of big, heavy shoes
it is pretty obvious how silly the results are!Not only that, but also Google Translate often does a poor job translating Brazilian Portuguese to English. For e.g. the question “Como apertar os cadarços?” (pt-BR) translates to “How to tighten the shoelaces?” but the same question “como apertar os cadarços?” (pt-BR) all lowercase translates to “how to fasten the shoelaces?” (fasten the shoelaces? really? like, say, fasten your seat belt?)…
There are a few, less-known alternatives to Google Translate – often with better results. DeepL is one such example of a tool providing rather decent results. I left as an exercise to our readers trying to translate the above Portuguese question (“Como se apertam os atacadores?”) into different languages – German, Italian, etc – and then those results back to English… and compare the Google Translate results with the DeepL results.
Edited for content. Please stay on topic. The topic is machine translation of languages, not the merits of the countries of origin.
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Last time I checked, machine translation had a loooong way to go. I remember a set of slides we did once, that for fun we put through Google Translate (EN–>SP). A “double-blind test” became the Spanish equivalent of “two-shutters test” (prueba de dos persianas), while a certain “mean cholesterol level” for a population became an “evil cholesterol level” (“nivel malvado de colesterol“).
Edited for content
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Last time I checked, machine translation had a loooong way to go (…)
LOL
I’ve seen a lot of that, too. Two enlightening and memorable examples of how blindly Google Translate is sometimes used as a lazy way to label consumer products were a permanent ink marker (“marcador de tinta permanente”) being described as “an ink pen with thick and permanent stroke” (badly translated to “caneta de tinta espessa e acidente vascular cerebral permanente”) or a power supply cable being translated to “cabo do poder” (lost in translation)…Edited for content.
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The problem of translating from one language to another when the original is salted with localisms and manerisms that are peculiar, not just to a certain place, but to a particular period of time, can be hard enough for a person, however fluent in both languages. But a machine, however “intelligent”, has an even bigger disadvantage: it is simply not practical to have it learning, whenever the occasion presents itself, haphazardly, over many years, accumulating information that sometimes might be repeated often and sometimes might be encountered just once, but it is lo sufficiently memorable to be remembered by a person who has heard or read it, long after the event. So we can build a huge fund of information in the living data base of our brains from which, with enough practice born out of the need to understand what is being said or written, can be retrieved as needed. Machines, however capacious their built-in memories might be, have the practical limitation that they cannot accumulate so much information just by hanging around in the world for many years and also have a functional difficulty figuring out if the information they come up with actually fits the context of a conversation, something that makes them prone to make, for example, weird or embarrassing translations, as Noel Carboni amusing example shows really well.
Over the eons of human evolution we have ended up with brains that are capable of communicating with words, spoken or written, often with speed, accuracy and little effort. Language is a huge help in life; it has, for example, kept our ancestors for countless generations safe from being eaten by lions, because someone that saw the lions come around and, even from a distance could give them a pretty good account of where and how many of those were around and what or whom they might be planing to have for lunch. The result of all this very long process is that we tend to be pretty good at using words, however incompetent we might be at many other things. Machines, on the other hand, not so much.Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV1 user thanked author for this post.
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