The Shallowness of Google Translate
For the past 5 years or so, as a kind of benchmark, I've been checking how Google translates a particular word from Greek, to French.<p>The word is "χελιδόνι", meaning "swallow" (the bird) in Greek. For as long as I've been trying this tiny little experiment, Google has been translating it to the French word "avaler"- the verb "to swallow".<p><a href="https://translate.google.com/#el/fr/%CF%87%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%B9%CE%B4%CF%8C%CE%BD%CE%B9" rel="nofollow">https://translate.google.com/#el/fr/%CF%87%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%B9...</a><p>Once in a while, a different translation appears- "machaon", 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 "swallow-tail", how can it not see the connection to the bird, "swallow"?<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've seen the same gender-reversal as Hofstadter reports in his article. The following string in Greek means "I saw my teacher and she said hello to me".<p><pre><code>  Είδα τη δασκάλα μου και μου είπε γειά. 
</code></pre>
The following are the French and English translations by GT:<p><pre><code>  J'ai vu mon professeur et il m'a dit bonjour.
  I saw my teacher and he said hello.
</code></pre>
This seems to happen because Google's English language model has learned that "he" is found in the context of "teacher" and "said" more often than "she" 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's not a criticism of Google Translate only. I think professor Chomsky might "win" that old debate with prof. Norvig, after all.