Also, the other way around works even better in my opinion. That is, translation from German into English. I tried it with a few excerpts from a philosophy text book and the results were impressive.
Your point that the AI doesn't "understand" the text still stands though.
> Your point that the AI doesn't "understand" the text still stands though
It should be noted that we don't know what "understanding" entails, so we don't even know if it's a coherent concept, or even a property humans have.
Right, that was one of the reasons why I put the word in quotes. But I'm sure that if one were to define "understanding" with regard to humans, then what the AI does would be far from it. I might be terribly wrong here though, and AI could be just one corner away from real understanding.
> But I'm sure that if one were to define "understanding" with regard to humans, then what the AI does would be far from it.
We have a bad habit of over-estimating our abilities, so I wouldn't bet too much money on that proposition.
Sure, but I'm not saying that human "understanding" is "better", only different from current AI. But who knows, I could be wrong and at a certain layer of abstraction they might be quite similar.
"Das heißt: wenn zwischen Sprache A und Sprache B unbedingt etwas übersetzt werden muss, wird 2017 ein Zweisprachiger den Boden _absolut mit maschineller Übersetzung wischen."
Not quite there yet, but pretty good in my opinion. (German native speaker)
https://www.deepl.com/