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Microsoft Announces Breakthrough In Chinese-To-English Machine Translation (techcrunch.com)

A team of Microsoft researchers announced on Wednesday they've created the first machine translation system that's capable of translating news articles from Chinese to English with the same accuracy as a person. "The company says it's tested the system repeatedly on a sample of around 2,000 sentences from various online newspapers, comparing the result to a person's translation in the process -- and even hiring outside bilingual language consultants to further verify the machine's accuracy," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The sample set, called newstest2017, was released just last fall at the research conference WMT17. Deep neural networks, a method of training A.I. systems, allowed the researchers to create more fluent and natural-sounding translations that take into account broader context that the prior approaches, called statistical machine translation. Microsoft's researchers also added their own training methods to the system to improve its accuracy -- things they equate to how people go over their own work time and again to make sure it's right.

The researchers said they used methods including dual learning for fact-checking translations; deliberation networks, to repeat translations and refine them; and new techniques like joint training, to iteratively boost English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation systems; and agreement regularization, which can generate translations by reading sentences both left-to-right and right-to-left. Zhou said the techniques used to achieve the milestone won't be limited to machine translations. The researchers caution the system has not yet been tested on real-time news stories, and there are other challenges that still lie ahead before the technology could be commercialized into Microsoft's products.
You can play around with the new translation system here.

72 comments

  1. 2,000 sentences by j33px0r · · Score: 1

    Cause that is all it takes.

    1. Re:2,000 sentences by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      640K of memory (2,000 sentences) is all you'll ever need. :)

    2. Re:2,000 sentences by mcswell · · Score: 1

      Not sure what you mean by this. That was their test set, not their training (nor dev) set. I don't think that's an unreasonable amount of data for a test set.

    3. Re:2,000 sentences by Potor · · Score: 1

      Surely everyone on /. knows that this is an (apocryphal) joke.

    4. Re:2,000 sentences by mcswell · · Score: 1

      Oh. Yes, I've heard that joke, but I didn't get the connection... thanks for pointing it out.

    5. Re:2,000 sentences by Excelcia · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's not reasonable as a test set if it's chosen to be stuff that's easy to translate. I just tried some Chinese assembly instructions, and it's terrible. And I don't mean the technical stuff, I mean the introduction:

      Original:
      (SNIP - the chinese characters won't work here. Alas for unicode.)

      Microsoft:
      Structure assembly, according to a certain order, the relevance of parts to subcontract; a total of eight subcontracts, from A1 to A8, the same package of parts are related, after assembly will constitute a machine components; in order to improve efficiency, to avoid confusion, please do not mix the different packages of parts all open after mixing together!!!!

      Actual:
      The structure is assembled in a certain order with parts relevant to each subsystem. There are a total of eight parts packages, from A1 to A8, each package related to a particular subsystem. In order to assist assembly and avoid confusion, please do not mix parts from the different packages.

      This isn't particularly technical writing. About the most complex word is subsystem, and even if you give them that as a mulligan, their translation is still almost incomprehensible. Definitely not natural english as they claim.

    6. Re:2,000 sentences by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The system is not trained on technical writing, therefore it will not be good on those. It i tuned on newsdata, on which it will be good. They explicitly say that this is not a production ready system. The newstest is definitely not "easy".

  2. Behind the scenes... by bi$hop · · Score: 0

    ...it's just an API call to translate.google.com

    1. Re:Behind the scenes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      God I hope not, their translation of most languages is hard to comprehend.

    2. Re: Behind the scenes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Microsoft is working hard to get this right so Trump can listen to his new mentor's "how to become a dictator" weekly calls and read the auto-translated transcripts. Don't worry about our security, I'm sure he will get a firewall exception for that...

    3. Re:Behind the scenes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      God lets hope not. Google is atrocious, can't even translate Chinese number words correctly. Order of magnitude off just about every time.

  3. So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    For years I've managed to deal with co-workers in Asia who don't speak English and simply use an online translator to craft the emails they send to me. Sure it can be a bit awkward sometimes but as long I keep my response simple everything works out well. On the rare occasion when it doesn't work they simply add someone to the conversation who speaks both English and their native language.

    1. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So maybe we don't always have to go through that bullshit because the technology is getting better?

  4. Maybe they can translate Trump's prison cries by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    because nobody else is going to be listening

    https://newrepublic.com/minutes/147457/end-white-nationalist-traditionalist-workers-party - Ahahahaaaaaa, inbred trash

  5. But.. why? Automated censorship by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can we PLEASE stop building weapons?

    The researchers caution the system has not yet been tested on real-time news stories,

    So how long before Microsoft translates Xi Jinping as Hitler or removes all references to Tiananmen Square ?

    LOL

  6. Same Accuracy Of WHAT Person? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I can assure you Chinese to English translation to the same accuracy of THIS (me) person is nothing to brag about!

  7. That's good because.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I like Chinese.. ... a 14, a 7, a 9 and lychees..

  8. Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now there's no excuse when the things I order online come with Engrish instructions.

  9. 1st article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    First article translated:

    "Penis penis penis, penis penis.

    Penis penis. Penis penis, penis penis penis.

    PENIS"

  10. Okay, but ... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 2

    Can it translate a Chinese Reporter's "eye-roll"? 'Cause one apparently broke China's Internet

    With a fellow reporter’s fawning question to a Chinese official pushing past the 30-second mark, Liang Xiangyi, of the financial news site Yicai, began scoffing to herself. Then she turned to scrutinize the questioner in disbelief.

    Looking her up and down, Ms. Liang rolled her eyes with such concentrated disgust, it seemed only natural that her entire head followed her eyes backward as she looked away in revulsion.

    Captured by China’s national news broadcaster, CCTV, the moment spread quickly across Chinese social media.

    ...

    On Chinese social media, GIFs and other online riffs inspired by Ms. Liang’s epic eye roll quickly proliferated, and by evening they were being deleted by government censors. Ms. Liang’s name became the most-censored term on Weibo, the microblogging platform. On Taobao, the freewheeling online marketplace, vendors began selling T-shirts and cellphone cases bearing her image.

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    1. Re:Okay, but ... by balbeir · · Score: 2

      Are they allowed to use the letter "N" in translations ?

    2. Re:Okay, but ... by gweihir · · Score: 1

      That one does not need any translation. It is basic human non-verbal communication.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    3. Re:Okay, but ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is just another example of how much better far eastern countries are at bringing up their children than we in America. In Thailand children are made by law to study the ancient martial arts of Judo and Placebo and school dinners consist of healthy national dishes such as sushi which are rich in vitamins and minerals.

      Here in America we are lucky if children eat anything other than McDonalds and physical education is almost non existent. Is it any wonder that over 60% of our children are clinically obese and that heart disease and lung cancer now claim 3 times the number of deaths than they did 2 hundred years ago.

  11. Oblig: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=translation+server+error+chinese+sign&oq=translation+server

  12. Because that's the only way by TommyNelson · · Score: 1

    and even hiring outside bilingual language consultants to further verify the machine's accuracy

    Only natives or bilinguals (if they really are) can verify the translaion's accuracy -- until you get your neural networks trained up to that point, of course.

    1. Re: Because that's the only way by loufoque · · Score: 1

      Most so-called bilinguals aren't.

    2. Re:Because that's the only way by rtb61 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Actually bi-cultural bi-linguals. There are differences in culture which drive the different expressions and translations. Auto-translation is of course a very important tool in global human discourse. The problem, well, the less informed, the less educated, those with far less understanding, will be readily able to communicate with each across the language barrier, think say American Rednecks and Chinese Rednecks, screaming at each other about how their armies can destroy each other and flooding other parts of the internet with their rubbish. Think a few hundred millions rather lame rude and crude trolls infecting all corners of the internet, generating racism and hate across a much broader scale. Societies losers spreading their bitterness across the internet striving to drive conflict and strife, better be prepared.

      The other thing of course, the translation software has to be open source and freely accessible, others corporations become the gate keepers data mining and manipulating the translation to serve their own individual psychopathic greed and ego. Every single corporation, once it has gained sufficient power become the dominant player, has every single time, demonstrated it's inherent psychopathic nature, well, at least the psychopathic nature of it's board and executive team, in cultural corporate groups, where the biggest POS rises to the top (it's built into that determination to be the dominant player, to charge monopolistic profit margins, to lie with impunity, to cheat impunity, to steal with impunity, to kill with indifference, to wholesale steal the rights of citizens, invade the privacy, seek to control their actions to serve the sick egos of corporations). You most definitely do not want any private for profit corporation to be the gatekeepers of language translation, most definitely not M$ or Google or Facebook or Twittter.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    3. Re:Because that's the only way by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 2

      It's pretty obvious to an English native speaker when a translation is gibberish. A native English-only speaker can't really affirm accuracy, as you stated, but could certainly tell when something is blatantly wrong. They could also at least judge the quality of the final translation's English.

      Generally speaking, most translation programs do really horribly at translating idioms, or context-sensitive but otherwise ambiguous phrases. I'd think this is a perfect application for deep learning algorithms to thrive at. Also, kudos for the article summary and headlines for not breathlessly calling this "AI", but pointing out that the techniques are used in training AI systems.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    4. Re:Because that's the only way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      who hurt you?

    5. Re: Because that's the only way by Malc · · Score: 1

      It seems to me that most translations are far too literal, and this is the challenge: translating idioms and other particular expressions from the vernacular.

      Itâ(TM)s interesting seeing where the focus is going with translations. Iâ(TM)ve worked for years with teams in Germany, Russia and China, and even speak a little German myself. Google translateâ(TM)s Chinese to English beats Russian to English hands down, yet Slavic languages are common across a swathe of Europe and surely closer to English. Even German to English is disappointing and the errors obvious to somebody with my limited skills in the language, and to think something like the most common 1.500 words of English are basically German, courtesy of the Angles and Saxons.

    6. Re: Because that's the only way by Dayze!Confused · · Score: 1

      If Chinese is well written it is fairly formulaic and rigid, following an STPVO format. They are talking about news articles, not TV dramas. I've tested a few phrases and usually one of the two seems to be an okay translation, where the other may be far off. I tried phrases like, "When I took my dog for a walk today I found a new Japanese restaurant. The prices seemed reasonable and affordable. The taste was pretty authentic." Which it seemed to do well with. The phrase literally translated from Chinese would read, "I today walk dog at the time realized new japan style restaurant. Prices reasonable, I eat able lift. Taste also authentic." Which may have been closer to what Google Translate would have done some years ago.

      Sadly I only type in Traditional Chinese and had to use Google Translate to convert the characters to Simplified which is the current requirement for using their translator. Had they implemented Traditional Chinese I would have tried more phrases.

      --
      "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
  13. try the double-reversi test by swell · · Score: 4, Interesting

    TFS is missing the important test of accuracy: translate Chinese > English, then back to Chinese. Will any Chinese person be able to understand it? Go back and forth twice for a more serious serious test. If you can't get access to Microsoft's software you can easily try this test with existing software. The results can be comical if your business doesn't depend on accuracy.

    --
    ...omphaloskepsis often...
    1. Re:try the double-reversi test by Aighearach · · Score: 2

      The summary is also faulty, it provides a link and says you can test the tool there, but following the link it says no, it is not the same tool at all, it is a worse tool that is also slower.

      I guess we can assume that whatever translation tool the editors are using to write the stories, it was unable to round-trip this story!

    2. Re:try the double-reversi test by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      Years ago I tried this out of curiosity. It would typically only take a single round trip to start being funny. After several round trips, you could barely tell what the original topic was. It's like a computerized version of the game "telephone."

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    3. Re:try the double-reversi test by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      That's good because the tool found in that link has trouble with idioms and also has trouble distinguishing want/will/can. Almost every sentence I tried had problems, sometimes simple problems that shouldn't even be hard.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:try the double-reversi test by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      That won't work.

      Translating asian languages into english is in general super easy. Translating english or german into a asian language is much harder.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    5. Re:try the double-reversi test by Darkling-MHCN · · Score: 1

      I think you'll find that's exactly what they're doing here some sample tests ...

      http://matrix.statmt.org/matri...

      So you read the article and the linked papers and came to this conclusion? Or did you just skip all of that and go straight to trolling?

    6. Re:try the double-reversi test by Darkling-MHCN · · Score: 1

      I think you'll find that's exactly how they're testing it... Here's some sample test data...

      http://matrix.statmt.org/matri...

      It's not perfect but it actually doesn't look too bad.

      I'm just wondering how you reached this conclusion? Did you read the article and the linked papers? Or did you just skip all of that and go straight to trolling?

    7. Re:try the double-reversi test by Darkling-MHCN · · Score: 1

      I think you'll find that's exactly how they're testing it... Here's some sample test data...

      http://matrix.statmt.org/matri...

      It's not perfect, but it actually looks pretty good.

      I'm just wondering how you reached this conclusion? Did you read the article and the linked papers? Or did you just skip all of that and go straight to trolling?

    8. Re:try the double-reversi test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It would only be a fair test if compared with human translators (that aren't able to ask questions, only be presented with text to translate). I don't doubt humans would do better, but I'm sure going back and forth more than twice would bring out some serious problems there too.

    9. Re:try the double-reversi test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They don't claim English->Chinese, therefore this doesn't make sense. But, FYI, one part of the training procedure actually involves backtranslation.

    10. Re:try the double-reversi test by nickersonm · · Score: 1

      That's been available for Japanese for nearly a decade.

      Or do I mean "Japanese is available for nearly 10 years."

      (it's less fun now that it was years ago - translation is getting better!)

  14. If they perfect English-to-Chinese translation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Be prepared for more Chinese spam, malware, viruses.

  15. No "N" by Zorro · · Score: 1

    Othig to see here..........

  16. The water goat strikes again! by marciot · · Score: 3, Funny

    I heard a story about an engineering company who used automatic translation to send documents back and forth with their international collaborators. At one point, their engineers were perplexed by the frequent mention of an âoewater goatâ in their correspondence.

    After digging through their source documents, they learned that the water goats were in fact hydraulic rams.

    1. Re:The water goat strikes again! by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

      by the frequent mention of an âoewater goatâ in their correspondence.

      I'm still perplexed by the frequent mention of "âoe" and "â" on Slashdot.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    2. Re: The water goat strikes again! by marciot · · Score: 1

      iPhone. Curly quotes. Sigh.

    3. Re: The water goat strikes again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The price of hipsterdom.

    4. Re: The water goat strikes again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > iPhone. Curly quotes. Sigh.

      It's not the iPhone (or not just the iPhone)!

      It's 2018 FFS. We cannot be subjected to the whims of certain companies and Slashdot -- to merit a nerd label -- should be the best prepared site to deal with such problems (which I repeat, we cannot have in 2018... this is like the fight between ASCII and EBCDIC of yore -- and it's ridiculous! Again!).

      But back to /. : is it so hard to display the correct chars? Is the iPhone a rarely used device?

      This is quite shameful, if you ask me...

    5. Re: The water goat strikes again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Only hipsters have the most popular phone on the market.

    6. Re:The water goat strikes again! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Not sure how useful translating back and forth is as a test. I use Chinese/English translation extensively and never need to do it. Any business trying to write a document collaboratively, especially a legal one, won't use machine translation anyway.

      I tested Microsoft's effort. It's not bad. Baidu is also quite good, and Google is okay. Sometimes it helps to try the same phrase in a couple of different ones. Microsoft and Baidu seem to give more natural translations, but Google is better at correcting errors like mis-spellings and mis-drawn Chinese characters.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    7. Re: The water goat strikes again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The price of not properly handling Unicode in 2018.

  17. DING DONG by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    DING DONG BANU

  18. I use myself! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The natural system of process to be excellently translating. Frequently must I cavort about colleagues and the co-worker. Ideal of understanding to make the best perchance problem, but without overhaul or need.

    Once upon the new situation, we provide best environment. Learn, we must.

  19. Sure but... by nospam007 · · Score: 1

    ...does it censor the letter 'N' as a real Chinese would do it?

  20. Yet no one can do a decent translation of spanish. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I really have my doubts about this one.. Given the poor state of Spanish to English translators out there I doubt there claim...

  21. Heavy on AI, light on language by gman003 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I read the MS blog and skimmed the actual paper. It gives a decent overview of the system design but has basically no details on the linguistics side of things. They just hired a bunch of people to do manual translation, both for training and for testing, but the only details of the results are a single table summarizing what categories of errors occurred.

    A lot of relevant information was missing. To start with, saying "Chinese language" is like saying "European language" - there isn't one unified "Chinese", but rather a variety of languages, topolects and dialects, with some level of mutual intelligibility, but it varies considerably. Not all variants use the same writing system - most use Hanzi, but there's the whole Traditional vs. Simplified issue, and some obscure varieties use entirely different systems (eg. Dungan is written using Cyrillic, despite being closer to Mandarin than many Hanzi-using topolects). And secondary writing systems abound - for teaching and for computer usage, both the Latin alphabet and Bopomofo syllabary are used, in the mainland and Taiwan, respectively.

    From context, they seem to be aiming for Mandarin Chinese, the most common variety, and they only accept input in Simplified Hanzi, but they don't make that at all clear from the paper. Was the training corpus exclusively Mandarin, or did it include Cantonese or Hakka or Minnan? Was it entirely Mainstream Mandarin, or were regional dialects like Sichuanese included? The nature of the logographic writing system elides a lot of differences, but I can't see how you could completely ignore the issue. At the very least, I would expect it would be a problem for false negatives in the validation - these are issues for human translators as well. Did they dig deeper into the reported translation issues, and find any were a case of "oh, the news article was written in MSM but quoted someone using Dalian dialect" and then have to figure out whether the human or the machine was more accurate? I didn't read the paper thoroughly but I didn't see any mention at all of any of this crap.

    Anyways, they may or may not have made progress on the AI front. I am even less qualified to judge that than I am the linguistics side of it. But there's so many things *not* discussed in the paper that I can't help but feel like they're overstating their results. Guess I'll have to wait for the language blogs to pick up on it.

    1. Re:Heavy on AI, light on language by SoftwareArtist · · Score: 2

      The answers to most of your questions are available, you just need to follow the references. They didn't discuss those details because it wasn't relevant to the paper's main topic whether they were using Mandarin or Cantonese. Besides, they didn't create the training data. They used an existing data set someone else had created, which is actually a collection of several data sets from different sources. So if you want all the details, here's the data.

      --
      "I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
    2. Re:Heavy on AI, light on language by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You wrote this long ass post when you have no idea what you're talking about. Mandarin and Cantonese and so forth are very different spoken, but really are almost the EXACT SAME FUCKING THING when written down. Especially if you avoid idioms and slangs and so forth. You seem to have heard this somewhere, which is why you say "The nature of the logographic writing system elides a lot of differences" (and seriously, who talks that way) but then you babble on with your ignorant bullshit.

      And the difference between simplified and traditional is nothing to a computer. A simple lookup table is really the only difference. So not relevant if the machine translator uses simplified.

      Anyway, if you actually understood Chinese a little bit you could just plug in a text and look at the translation (which to my mind was very impressive, if not perfect). But instead you don't know anything of what you're talking about...so you posted a long ass post about it?

      Please lurk more and post less. You have nothing to contribute to Slashdot.

    3. Re:Heavy on AI, light on language by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, *you* are the one who is ignorant and wrong. I speak and write Cantonese, so I know that you are wrong.

      Cantonese and Mandarin *are* different when written down, because quite often they use different phrases (combination of characters) to describe the same thing. Why does this happen? This is partly due to cultural and social differences (different phrases were developed in different regions and countries, e.g. Hong Kong vs Taiwan vs different parts of China), and partly due to how the two languages are spoken in the first place: since Cantonese had 9 tones but Mandarin only 4, there are too many homophones and a limited range of sounds in Mandarin, and so a perfectly good phrase in Cantonese (or even classical Chinese) would cause confusion or difficulty in Mandarin, which causes people to use a different phrase (with different characters) to mean the same thing.

      And please, translating between written traditional and simplified Chinese using a simple lookup table will *NOT* work properly, because there is not a 1-1 relationship between the two sets of characters. For many characters, you need context to be able to translate correctly. You can go from traditional to simplified easily enough, but going the other way is problematic and leaves you with a lot of wrong characters in the result, which is truly cringe-worthy. This problem is manifested in A LOT of online *traditional* Chinese text, because they were originally in traditional, then auto-translated to simplified then back to traditional. It is horrific - every time I encounter something like this, I shake my head, as yet another piece of writing gets destroyed.

      Next time, don't insult people who know more than you.

    4. Re:Heavy on AI, light on language by gman003 · · Score: 1

      You wrote this long ass post when you have no idea what you're talking about.

      I will readily concede that I do not speak Chinese, in any form. But I am interested in linguistics, albeit as a hobbyist, and I know enough to know what questions need to be asked, if not the answers.

      Even if only for replication, I would have expected the paper to make *some* mention of the language side of things. Instead, they seem to have left it at "we threw this giant corpus of text at it, and hired a bunch of people to evaluate samples manually and they said we did pretty good" with no further detail. I'd expect even an English text corpus to mention whether it was US, UK, Commonwealth or some other variety of English, so seeing that never stated explicitly when dealing with a "language" with far more internal variety is worrying.

      Mandarin and Cantonese and so forth are very different spoken, but really are almost the EXACT SAME FUCKING THING when written down. Especially if you avoid idioms and slangs and so forth.

      So, under conditions where machine translation has trouble, you have to be cognizant of differences between topolects. Why, then, would a paper on improving the state of machine translation not even address the issue? Even a passing "regional variations did not present a problem" or "so far the net is only trained on MSM" would have been enough.

      You seem to have heard this somewhere, which is why you say "The nature of the logographic writing system elides a lot of differences" (and seriously, who talks that way) but then you babble on with your ignorant bullshit.

      I, apparently, talk that way. I usually try not to overdo it, since it can come off as pretentious, but I typed that first post on a tablet and didn't feel like using less concise phrasing, since typing it was a pain already. (Seriously, most of my posts are *way* longer than that one)

      And the difference between simplified and traditional is nothing to a computer. A simple lookup table is really the only difference. So not relevant if the machine translator uses simplified.

      That does not track with what I've read. First, if you're in Unicode, a lookup table is unnecessary - thanks to Han Unification, Simple and Traditional glyphs are mapped to the same Unicode code points, so a lookup table shouldn't even be necessary unless you're accepting inputs, or doing internal processing, in a non-Unicode encoding.

      Second, I regularly see complaints about Han Unification causing problems. Mostly it's in the context of Kanji/Hanja but unless I'm misremembering, there are problems trying to treat Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters identically.

      Anyway, if you actually understood Chinese a little bit you could just plug in a text and look at the translation (which to my mind was very impressive, if not perfect). But instead you don't know anything of what you're talking about...so you posted a long ass post about it?

      I made a post raising questions. I probably ought to have written it in a more "this seems off to me, can someone who knows better comment?" way, but I guess I assumed my tone would carry through. And I realize now that the way I wrote it seemed like I was speaking with more authority than I actually claim. Guess that'll teach me not to post on /. at 2am on my tablet...

      Please lurk more and post less. You have nothing to contribute to Slashdot.

      Even if you disagree with the points I raised, this kind of incivility is uncalled for.

  22. Re:Yet no one can do a decent translation of spani by AHuxley · · Score: 1

    Follow the funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–United_States_relations
    The US direct methods in South America did not need any translation.
    The US expects China to be generating a lot of digital information so fast new translation methods are getting funded.
    When a nation needs a lot of new quality translation support it means another nation is giving away information at a huge rate.
    The USA now has access to a lot of China and has to translate what it has found in real time.
    So much information the US human translators cant keep up with the amounts getting collected in real time.
    So much sensitive information the US cant trust its own human translators?
    China has lost control of its crypto and the USA has to look for new methods to keep up.
    The last time the US was so interested in translation was for Korean in the 1950's.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  23. Great. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now all of our news will be a cheap Chinese knock-off as well. Thanks a lot.

    1. Re:Great. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Still be more honest and reliable than what you're getting now.

  24. Just tested it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Entered:
    Got: This hand Yuzhen pit dad
    When it should have been: This mobile game is bullshit.

    Some stuff did translate better than I expected, but it's only better than people that don't speak both languages and are using a dictionary.

  25. Why not just buy Chinese translation software by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

    I was exchanging a number of lengthy emails (about 20 each) with someone with from China. After about 15 messages each I found out that they didn't speak English and they were using translation software. The Chinese software is so good that I didn't even think it was being used.

  26. Excellent! by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

    I'll be able to read the signs around Melbourne and Sydney, especially on the property listings in the city!

  27. Re: Fly Lice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    All your base are belong to us!

  28. Which person? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "capable of translating news articles from Chinese to English with the same accuracy as a person"

    Which person? A guy with a dictionary translating word for word?