Lets Help Improve Google Translate... : )

One of the things (the only thing really) that taints my use of Google Translate is that it outputs Japanese as romaji. Recently, I provided feedback (see below) asking that they consider providing – at least as an option – an ability to convert Japanese to kana. I am interested in any comments members of the RTK forum might care to make. Once enough people have commented, I will send a link to this thread to Google via their feedback page.

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Dear Google

Let's make an awesome product more awesome...

One feature of Google Translate is that it transliterates the input text into English (Romaji). This is helpful for beginning Japanese students; For more advanced students it is a distraction – to be of benefit, the input text should be converted to kana (ie. Hiragana and Katakana, Japanese letters)

Romaji is only of use if a student wants to learn basic Japanese. For example, a student may be visiting Japan for a week's holiday, not have time to study kana, but require some basic language basics such as directions and greetings. It has no place in a Japanese language course that is longer than a couple of hours. For any student intending to study the language seriously, romaji becomes an impediment.

As the majority of the people who use Google Translate are clearly not beginners, it would be great if you provided the option to convert the Japanese input as kana. This would be of tremendous value, especially to intermediate students, such as myself. who still stumble over the pronunciation of certain kanji (Japanese characters) but don't want to see everything reduced to the Japanese learner equivalent of a Golden Book.

From my POV the best solution would be to provide three options; a) romaji only, b) kana and romaji, or c) kana only.The user could select one of these options as a default.

Please implement this.To do so would not seem to be technically challenging but would make a huge difference for those of us who are serious about learning Japanese.

Yours sincerely

H R Ornis

It outputs kanji and kana in a large bold font for me, with romaji in a much smaller font below the main translation box.

Also, just out of interest, if you are past the beginner stage how do Google Translate's sentences help you?

The translations proved by Google translate aren't that great. Everytime I use it to translate a Japanese sentence the translation is full of gibberish.

Harpagornes Wrote:As the majority of the people who use Google Translate are clearly not beginners,

I'd expect the majority to be people who don't know the source language at all. Especially with language pairs like English-Japanese where the translation tends to be gibberish.

If furigana is okay, there are furiganizers for Firefox and Chrome, and this website for others. If it's only the occasional word, try Rikai[chan|kun|sama].

Nyanda Wrote:Also, just out of interest, if you are past the beginner stage how do Google Translate's sentences help you?

john555 Wrote:The translations proved by Google translate aren't that great. Everytime I use it to translate a Japanese sentence the translation is full of gibberish.

My Japanese is best described at the intermediate level having become rusty through years of neglect : (

In my youth, pre Internet I harboured secret ambitions to become an interpreter and studied ithe language quite diligently; unfortunately I didn't begin until I was almost 28, and as my work in Japan involved non-stop teaching English, I made slow progress. I am in awe of the resources available to language learners now.

Caveats aside, I find Google Translate incredibly useful. I can read Japanese (badly) so I like to cut and paste any Japanese messages people send me into GT to see if there is anything I have missed. Ditto when I am writing Japanese: the Google output is grammatically hopeless (all kudos however for them for developing it), but it gives me something to work on, which I then clean up to the best of my ability – if it is critical, I ask a native speaker to proof-read my attempts. The trouble is that I quite like puns, allusion, etc so sometimes I doubt my proof readers. I miss the somewhat bohemian crowd I used to hang with. I need to cultivate more Japanese friends and get involved in the local community.

I am deeply impressed by this forum and would like to use this opportunity to thank Fabrice (and all of you) for making it such a valuable (and friendly) resource.

Vempele Wrote:I'd expect the majority to be people who don't know the source language at all. Especially with language pairs like English-Japanese where the translation tends to be gibberish.

Good point – I stand corrected.

Now I am interested...

How prevalent is the use of machine translation within the translation community? I find GT to be extremely useful in translating unknown Japanese compounds. The overall grammatical structure however, not so useful.

Given that GT is undergoing constant revision, and utilizes a rapidly growing database of previous translations, what level of accuracy could be anticipated in the future? I know nothing of the technical challenges that machine translation entails but it is a subject I am interested in.

Newbie question: How does one post an image to this forum?

I gather from the BBCode that I use an img tag.

Quote:If you want to display an image you can use the img tag.
img]http://punbb.informer.com/img/small_logo.png[/img* produces:

I gather from this I must first publish an image to the web before I can link to it via this forum: What is the recommended method for doing this?

*Opening and closing brackets [...] omitted to enable BBCode to be displayed – If anyone has a more elegant solution let me know : )

Try this out: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=10386

Harpagornes Wrote:*Opening and closing brackets [...] omitted to enable BBCode to be displayed – If anyone has a more elegant solution let me know : )

Empty tags within tags: [[b][/b]img]http://punbb.informer.com/img/small_logo.png[/[b][/b]img] produces [img]http://punbb.informer.com/img/small_logo.png[/img]

Harpagornes Wrote:

Vempele Wrote:I'd expect the majority to be people who don't know the source language at all. Especially with language pairs like English-Japanese where the translation tends to be gibberish.

Good point – I stand corrected.

Now I am interested...

How prevalent is the use of machine translation within the translation community? I find GT to be extremely useful in translating unknown Japanese compounds. The overall grammatical structure however, not so useful.

Given that GT is undergoing constant revision, and utilizes a rapidly growing database of previous translations, what level of accuracy could be anticipated in the future? I know nothing of the technical challenges that machine translation entails but it is a subject I am interested in.

If you just want translations of the words, the WWWJDIC "text glossing" feature is better than Google Translate.

yudantaiteki Wrote:If you just want translations of the words, the WWWJDIC "text glossing" feature is better than Google Translate.

Thanks Yudantaiteki, Great to see that you and some of the old timers are still around. Are you still at University? I always wondered what you would do with your impressive language skills.

Me, I'm messing around with Japanese again after a hiatus of several years. Sadly I am never going to be very good (I would have loved to have studied it seriously) but it is still fun to play with.