back to article Si vous comprenez ces mots, vous êtes français ou l'intelligence artificielle de Facebook

Facebook’s language translation is now finally powered by several large neural networks. The social media giant announced on Thursday it has switched to using neural networks for translating people's posts and status updates. It’s not the first outfit to make this kind of jump – Google and Microsoft upgraded their translation …

  1. David Roberts

    Send three and fourpence

    I assume the true test of translation software would be to translate a phrase through three or four languages and back to the original and still preserve the original meaning.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Send three and fourpence

      Unless the phrase is absolutely trivial - like "shut the door" - that's unlikely to be possible. Context helps enormously.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Send three and fourpence

        I would expect that a good human translator could translate David's original post from English to Turkish and preserve the meaning. Then another translator from Turkish to Russian. Then another from Russian to Japanese. Then another from Japanese to English. It may not be the exact same sentence, but the meaning would be the same. I agree with him, a true test of translation software would be that it is capable of doing the same.

        Though translation software that good would take away the fun of using translation software to take a sentence and translate it from language A to language B and back again repeatedly until it settles on a particular sentence in language A. The results are quite often hilarious, and shows how far translation software still has to go.

        I have some Facebook friends who are from other countries, so they might make posts and have friends comment in Dutch, Finnish and so forth. I've used the 'translate' link on them and seen some pretty hilarious stuff. I'll have to see it is still as funny now that Facebook has supposedly improved its translation software.

        1. DropBear

          Re: Send three and fourpence

          All I can say is that watching the output of (allegedly) human translators working on TV show subtitles, they startlingly often demonstrate a lack of context sensitivity (even to context from within the same show) that can and does produce incredibly absurd results with words that can have several meanings, the right one being obvious to even a layman paying some attention to the text he's working on, past the current sentence...

          1. WolfFan Silver badge

            Re: Send three and fourpence

            Wanna have fun? Watch 'Das Boot', the original version, in German, with the original English subtitles. If you know even a little German or if you're watching with a German-speaker, hilarity ensues. It's not supposed to be a comedy...

            Fans of Sven Hassel's stories about a Danish volunteer in a German tank company in WWII can have similar fun by having the German and English versions of a book side-by-side. For the most fun, try 'Blitzfreeze' and 'SS General'.

            1. DropBear
              Happy

              Re: Send three and fourpence

              "Watch 'Das Boot', the original version, in German, with the original English subtitles."

              Oh, you're totally on! I actually have that I just haven't watched it yet, and I always watch with subtitles and the original audio. I know enough German for demo purposes, so it sounds like I'm in for some fun...

          2. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

            Re: Send three and fourpence

            "All I can say is that watching the output of (allegedly) human translators working on TV show subtitles, ..."

            That's usually due to the "you get what you pay for" effect.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There is also the problem of knowing when to retain the word or phrase as it appears in the original language.

  3. Slx

    Savez-vous qu'il est possible de comprendre le français, sans être français, ou une intelligence artificielle :P

    I look forward to seeing some of its translations, as it is extremely difficult to comprehend language without context, even for a human.

  4. frank ly

    Mais non,

    Je suis anglais et une vraie personne.

    1. Pompous Git Silver badge

      Re: Mais non,

      "Je suis anglais et une vraie personne."
      A likely story!

      Latin: Verisimile est fabula

      English: The play is likely

      I do love machine translation :-)

    2. DropBear
      Trollface

      Re: Mais non,

      "Je suis anglais et une vraie personne."

      Alors, je suis anglais aussi et pas une vraie personne. ...wait, no - the other way around!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    So Ferengi will have the Universal Translator...

    .... before Vulcans?

    What could go wrong in this timeline?

  6. handleoclast
    Coat

    Out of sight, out of mind

    Invisible idiot.

    1. HandleAlreadyTaken

      Re: Out of sight, out of mind

      I thought it was "blind idiot"?

  7. JimmyPage Silver badge
    Stop

    Come on Commentards !!!!

    Babel Fish.

    That's all.

    1. Swiss Anton

      Re: Come on Commentards !!!!

      The Babel fish feeds off of brainwaves, making it somewhat useless for the task of translating Facebook posts.

      1. JimmyPage Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Come on Commentards !!!!

        Fair point ...

        1. Chris Holford
          Happy

          Re:Fair point

          -> blonde apex

  8. Big_Boomer Silver badge
    Terminator

    Puis j'etre le premier à souhaiter le Bienvenu a nos nouveaux maitres IA Francophones?

  9. hatti

    Zut alors!

    Oh mon dieu, Ciel net!

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