Current translation:
OP’s version is more poetic
I agree. Translation is much better these days and I am sure someone else was going to be curious about what the actual translation was.
Good they fixed it but I wouldn’t be surprised if it broke again. Once I was doing a coding project that involved Google Translate and I was using the same sentences for testing. In a week translation has changed 3 times, from bad to good to bad.
Out of curiosity, did it change back to the previous bad translation, or create a new bad translation?
New bad.
The different Google translate frontends have different translations sometimes, it might be that. I think it’s the web result and the website being different? Or the app and the website/web result? Idk.
Or maybe they didn’t use Google translate at all? There are other ways to translate things.
Who? The post OP specifies Google Translate and the comment OP shows Google Translate.
Yeah I meant the post OP. While the title says “Google translate” I see no reason to believe it’s that rather than some other product…especially as it’s not reproducible.
Probably just something they came across and made an assumption, rightly or wrongly.
Might not be an accurate translation but it still speaks the truth. Unfortunately there aren’t many ways of avoiding the future.
Good thing I’ll never reach the future, there’s only the eternal now
There’s one way that I know of which while not technically evading the inexorable grinding misery of entropy, will ensure that you remain blissfully unaware of it.
This problem stems from この先 being able to mean “ahead from here in space”, or in time which (mis)translated to “the future”. Without proper context (that it is a sign on a road) the translation software had to make a guess, and it guessed wrong.
It may be possible to infer from 前へ行く in the second sentence that it is more likely referring to space than time, but I still think it is possible to construct some similar sentences which even humans might misunderstand.
Google Translate is generally hot garbage. I’ve actually found DeepL surprisingly good especially with more “niche” languages like Finnish, although it does definitely sometimes get things hilariously wrong
It seems like the sign is trying to kill me in this translation.
I distrust DeepL ever since I found out it translates “irritating” into german as “irritierend” (which means confusing, and is a common mistranslation for obvious reasons). Though I’m sure google translate does similar dumb things.
It also does mean annoying/irritating, I don’t think it’s wrong.
Duden apparently agrees but it’s a rare enough use case that I’ve never heard it used that way in my life, fair enough tho. Still not a great default tl but at least somewhat acceptable then.
Could it be regional? I hear it relatively often in Munich in that meaning.
Maybe, since I live in the north! (Fwiw the meaning of irritating as in irritating skin is pretty common here too, just not as annoyance).
Is that DeepL’s app? I’ve never used it so I have no idea what the UI looks like and I didn’t try to translate the sign’s text with the web version.
Edit: out of curiosity I tried out how the web version handles this sign:
Yeah, it’s the android version.
To be fair, It looks like a problem with the OCR from the app rather than the translation. When I use the phone’s native OCR and copy/paste the text into DeepL Translate, I get the same result as you.
Ah right, that definitely makes sense. I can imagine OCR’ing Kanji could be a bit of a nightmare
The AI in the machine is crying for help.
Seppuku mode: activate!
Me directly addressing reality.
I know Lemmy despises artificial intelligence but how’s it fare at this sort of thing?
Hadn’t tried it for Japanese before now but in my experience it’s pretty good at European languages, at least the ones I know how to speak.
Lemmy despises artificial intelligence
Nah. A lot of people here are OK with it. It’s just that the haters are really vocal about it.
I mean, Japanese is pretty complex, and those tools are not. It’ll give an ok translation, but you need an interpreter to really iron these things out
It has gotten better since the days of me posting various “Engrish” I would see that were posted officially on wayfinding signage in places like Tokyo and Shinjuku stations, Haneda Airport, rest areas along the national expressway system and so forth.
When I finally go to Japan I’ll be on the quest to collect as many “Engrish” signs as possible! I’m sure some are left!
@hypertown
It’s gotten better but only because the translation algorithms are better. But the rabbit hole gets deep real quick too.
