Google translate abuse

[Leon_Michiel]

Maybe it's because I'm late in my fourth night-shift, maybe it's because several hours of studying French is getting to me. Either way, I'm having endless fun with google translate right now.

Google translate has a 'listen' function that I find very handy for figuring out pronunciation. You can also switch around the two languages you're translating at the click of a button. I sometimes forget when I do this.

Listening to a Dutch voice (my native language) pronouncing French words isn't exactly helpful, the whole point for me is to learn French without the Dutch accent. However it did amuse me. One thing led to another. I decided to let the French voice-over lady sing some lalala to me. And then some.

Anyone else have ideas for the voice-over ladies and lads of translate.google.com? Make them sing!

So far I have tried:
the lyrics to 'Offspring - Pretty Fly for a White Guy' and 'Bloodhound gang - the roof is on fire' in French
Shakespear sonnets in German
'Voulez-vous coucher avec moi' in African
Hitler speeches
Haiku are allot of fun as well
Bible phrases

Anyone else? I'm sure I'm not the first one to have thought of this!

[RabbitWho]

You think that's fun you should try acapela text to speech. Amazing quality.

When I first found that.. oh the horrible things I made Geoffry say..

I'm bored with that now so I just use it to help me pronounce things... pretty much every day

[Mike_Bson]

For some reason, the English->Russian voice talks incoherently fast. So yeah, I guess that feature will be no good for me. Still useful to find the words themselves, though (I can pronounce them by myself. . .).

[Twelfthroot]

I seem to be missing something - how does one access this text to voice feature? I only get a speaker icon to pronounce English, and only when I've translated a very small amount of text.

[RabbitWho]

It seems to only work for some words.

http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-sp ... -demo.html < Works for everything, but only short paragraphs at a time.

[speakinggerman]

Actually, I think that Google's approach to translation is quite clever and promising (namely: search for similar context).

However, I'm appalled how bad the results really are in terms of the two most basic stumbling block for automatic translation:
- flection and
- word combination (e.g. realizing that 'house' in 'house work' draws it particular meaning from the combination).

I am convinced that you can handle quite a lot of examples for these by just evaluation the most frequent variations/combinations.
But the results are still rather poor ...

[vaguelyhumanoid]

I made it say "oh my god, you killed Kenny". Good times.
I also like retranslating to the point of incoherence, kinda like Translation Party except with multiple languages.

[RabbitWho]

Actually, I think that Google's approach to translation is quite clever and promising (namely: search for similar context).

However, I'm appalled how bad the results really are in terms of the two most basic stumbling block for automatic translation:
- flection and
- word combination (e.g. realizing that 'house' in 'house work' draws it particular meaning from the combination).

I am convinced that you can handle quite a lot of examples for these by just evaluation the most frequent variations/combinations.
But the results are still rather poor ...

You make it sound so simple, you know for example according to OED there are 464 possible definitions of the word "set". I think they catch more compound nouns / phrasal verbs etc. than they miss.

The people working on google translator are fricking incredible. Btw it's "housework".

[Meteorswarm]

You make it sound so simple, you know for example according to OED there are 464 possible definitions of the word "set". I think they catch more compound nouns / phrasal verbs etc. than they miss.

The people working on google translator are fricking incredible. Btw it's "housework".

Google translate works by statistical machine translation; there aren't people sitting down writing rules for translation; they feed it the internet instead.