TechGist05

There was an interesting discussion thread in Reddit about the Google deception post with somebody with the alias oneasasum that I thought was worth highlighting here, since it was the most coherent criticism of my original post . Google makes MASSIVE progress on Machine Translation -- "We show that our GNMT system approaches the accuracy achieved by average bilingual human translators on some of our test sets." This is a slightly cleaned up version of just our banter from the whole thread that you can see at the link above which also has other fun comments: KV: Seriously exaggerated -- take a look at this for more accurate overview The Google Neural Machine Translation Marketing Deception ow.ly/Ii57304JV6S HE: You should have also posted this article, as you did on another Reddit forum: https://slator.com/technology/hyperbolic-experts-weigh-in-on-google-neural-translate/ That's a much better take, in my opinion. .... I saw the blog posting myself the other day....

Recently I came upon this little tidbit and initially thought how wonderful, (NMT is surely rising!) and decided to take a closer look and read through the research paper . This exercise left me a little uncertain as I now felt doubt, and began to suspect that this is just another example of that never-ending refrain of the MT world, the empty promise. Without a doubt Google had made some real progress, but “Nearly Indistinguishable From Human Translation” and “GNMT reduces translation errors by more than 55%-85% on several major language pairs “. Hmmm, not really, not really at all, was what my pesky brain kept telling me, especially as I saw this announcement coming up again and again through many news channels, probably pushed heavily by the Google marketing infrastructure. Surely the great Google of the original “Don’t Be Evil” ethos would not bullshit us thus. (In their 2004 founders' letter prior to their initial public offering, Larry Page and Sergey Brin explained tha...

This is a continuation of this posting . 2.                    Is Google Right For The Professional Language Services Industry? For more than 40 years, machine translation has promised much but consistently failed to deliver. MT promises had come to be seen more as “empty promises”. In recent years, for enterprises and language service providers who want control of the translation, Google’s machine translation has been an eye-opener for many but still not a real solution to their requirements. Before Google launched its own SMT translation technology in October 2007, Google used Systran, as Yahoo Babelfish still does today. The measure of machine translation in the public eye was Systran technology, even if the public did not know the name of the technology behind the free translation services. Today that measure has moved to Google, with a common perception that Google is the state-of-the-art in machi...