The Shallowness of Google Translate
For the past 5 years or so, as a kind of benchmark, I&#x27;ve been checking how Google translates a particular word from Greek, to French.<p>The word is &quot;χελιδόνι&quot;, meaning &quot;swallow&quot; (the bird) in Greek. For as long as I&#x27;ve been trying this tiny little experiment, Google has been translating it to the French word &quot;avaler&quot;- the verb &quot;to swallow&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;translate.google.com&#x2F;#el&#x2F;fr&#x2F;χελιδόνι" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;translate.google.com&#x2F;#el&#x2F;fr&#x2F;χελι...</a><p>Once in a while, a different translation appears- &quot;machaon&quot;, which is a kind of butterfly, the Old World swallow-tail. This is slightly closer but still absurd. If GT can make the connection to &quot;swallow-tail&quot;, how can it not see the connection to the bird, &quot;swallow&quot;?<p>The problem seems to be that, in order to translate from Greek to French, Google goes via English. A great big chunk of context is lost in the process, especially since now the translation between two languages that have different forms for male and female nouns goes through a third language that does not.<p>So for example, I&#x27;ve seen the same gender-reversal as Hofstadter reports in his article. The following string in Greek means &quot;I saw my teacher and she said hello to me&quot;.<p><pre><code>  Είδα τη δασκάλα μου και μου είπε γειά. 
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The following are the French and English translations by GT:<p><pre><code>  J&#x27;ai vu mon professeur et il m&#x27;a dit bonjour.
  I saw my teacher and he said hello.
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This seems to happen because Google&#x27;s English language model has learned that &quot;he&quot; is found in the context of &quot;teacher&quot; and &quot;said&quot; more often than &quot;she&quot; is. But of course, such a statistical association is, well, meaningless and for that useless when it comes to translation, where you actually need to know when the least likely case is correct.<p>Generally, it looks like the complete abandonment of any attempt at representing meaning, and relying instead on text statistics to do meaning-intensive work like translation, is producing a lot of nonsense. And that&#x27;s not a criticism of Google Translate only. I think professor Chomsky might &quot;win&quot; that old debate with prof. Norvig, after all.