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Google gets more multilingual, but will it get the nuance?

11 Comments
By FRANKLIN BRICEÑO and MATT O'BRIEN

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This is a little late but is the perfect example of 'nuance' versus 'meaning' which I had forgotten to include in my comment above. Not too long ago, an American crook by the name of Pence said of the U.S. on Twitter, "Patriotic education has been replaced with political indoctrination." The two phrases, 'political indoctrination' and 'patriotic education' are, technically, identical in 'meaning'. But, for the nonthinking mind, are very different in 'nuance'. Again, the art of the propagandist or marketeer...

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"Google Debuts Smart Glasses Built With Real-Time Language Translation"

The device basically brings Google Translate to a pair of smart glasses by displaying the translated text over the lenses.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-debuts-smart-glasses-built-with-real-time-language-translation

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Google’s translation of Japanese-English is quite poor; DeepL blows google away in accuracy and nuance.

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Well...Google cant translate Japanese correctly yet so.. nothing to get too exited about

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Out of the languages added 8 are Indian languages apart from Dhivehi, the language of Maldives.

What is surprising here is that it took so long for Google to add Sanskrit, which even though a dead language, is considered to be a natural language closest to a programming language with its rigid syntax and strict rules of sentence formation.

https://www.utoronto.ca/news/it-s-good-coding-computer-science-students-drawn-classes-sanskrit-3500-year-old-language

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'Nuance' is not 'language', per se. It is more 'cultural perception', a sort of 'meta-language', and even native speakers of a language can be blind to 'nuances' of the words they use as any good propagandist knows. The consistently correct interpretation of 'nuance' will have to await a 'Turing Test' perfect AI who has 'lived' among the culture for a time...at which time Human translators will have become 'obsolete' and simultaneous translation headphones or earbuds a common appliance for travelers and media aficionados alike...and maybe not so far into the future...will this help us to finally become 'Humanity' rather than the many competing 'versions' of Humanity we are now? One can only hope...

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I was at a bar in Sapporo many years ago and the miso soup was so delicious that I asked Mama what the secret was. "Ago dashi," she explained. I knew what dashi was, a broth or powder used in flavouring, but I didn't know what ago was.

When I looked it up on the internet, I found a page about ago dashi, but couldn't read it easily because it was in Japanese. So, I clicked on Google translate. Ago, by the way, is a flying fish. But when I saw the Google translation for ago dashi, it was "The jaw, it comes out!"

I have the same question as the headline, "Will it get the nuance?"

Probably not, because it's too far onto the machine side, a much better application, way over on the human side, is deepl. You input natural English and you get natural Japanese and vice versa.

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