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A comment on How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?. Parent comment

Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by heavenlyblue on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @11:58AM (#23540693)
Google Translate was good before the so-called "AI revolution".
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Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by simonw on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @02:17PM (#23542294)
Google Translate today is absolutely spectacular.

A fun game used to be "translate this phrase English to French, then translate it back again and laugh at how meaningless it's made by the round-trip". That doesn't work any more.

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Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by jtjbdhsjjdnd on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @12:59PM (#23541371)
As far as I remember it was close to unusable. Even most basic translation to languages besides German, Spanish and French was a nightmare. That was at lest true during my second year at the university (~2010-2011).
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Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by rrrrrrrrrrrryan on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @03:07PM (#23542845)
From what I've read, the early translations were really rough (but on par with competing free products), until they fired all their linguists and brought in AI guys.
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Re:How many of you know that the team is working on somethin... by thu2111 on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @01:06PM (#23553820)
Not exactly. Google Translate was always a statistical approach from day one. That was the reason it was better than the rules engines that dominated before that. The Translate guys really pioneered statistical machine translation.

However it was all done with hand-crafted statistical functions and code. The new stuff using deep learning is the first time it'd have been referred to as "AI".

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