I was reading some angry comments by a member whose thread has been closed hours ago. This person wrote a saying in a language other than English. A language spoken by quite a number of people in the world that I couldn't understand. While using Google Translate in order to ascertain any possible precise nuances of the sentence, I've been led to ponder on how much of what we say might be lost in translation when we use such tools. Here's the result of my experiment taking a sentence in vernacular English as a seed and Hawaiian (how vernacular, I don't know) as target language in the first part of an obvious loop:

Input in English: "Shut up, bitch!"

Translation to Hawaiian: "E noho mālie, e ka wahine!"

Input in Hawaiian: "E noho mālie, e ka wahine!"

Translation to English: "Be quiet, woman!"

I somehow find hard to believe that GT would produce anything like the inverse loop here.

This is mostly an observation, but any reflections are welcome.

Two things I noticed today.

Firstly google search is no longer offereing translations (at least today)

Don't know if we are now supposed to use only the google lens app. But I don't have access to that

Secondly some searches are no longer headed by an AI summary.

Big g needs to wake up before it goes the way of Big Blue and M$ before it.

11 minutes ago, studiot said:

Firstly google search is no longer offereing translations (at least today)

I noticed that Gemini on chrome isnt translating "E noho mālie, e ka wahine" ,but usually it answers and translate anything which we search.

Yes, google translate plays tricks. I've felt it very well, because English is not my native language also. So, a third language is needed to understand what_is_going_on. For example, from my language to Spanish (or whatever) the verb "to like" is translated as "as". Do you know why? Because English "like" has two meanings. Maybe it translates to English, and then to the required language, I don't know.

22 hours ago, joigus said:

I was reading some angry comments by a member whose thread has been closed hours ago. This person wrote a saying in a language other than English. A language spoken by quite a number of people in the world that I couldn't understand. While using Google Translate in order to ascertain any possible precise nuances of the sentence, I've been led to ponder on how much of what we say might be lost in translation when we use such tools. Here's the result of my experiment taking a sentence in vernacular English as a seed and Hawaiian (how vernacular, I don't know) as target language in the first part of an obvious loop:

Input in English: "Shut up, bitch!"

Translation to Hawaiian: "E noho mālie, e ka wahine!"

Input in Hawaiian: "E noho mālie, e ka wahine!"

Translation to English: "Be quiet, woman!"

I somehow find hard to believe that GT would produce anything like the inverse loop here.

This is mostly an observation, but any reflections are welcome.

This is the reason, I think, that a written language degrades, in terms of understanding across cultures, both different cultures and generational cultural drift (evolution); whilst the spoken word remains understandable across generation's and culture's.

On 7/28/2025 at 2:02 PM, joigus said:

I was reading some angry comments by a member whose thread has been closed hours ago. This person wrote a saying in a language other than English. A language spoken by quite a number of people in the world that I couldn't understand. While using Google Translate in order to ascertain any possible precise nuances of the sentence, I've been led to ponder on how much of what we say might be lost in translation when we use such tools. Here's the result of my experiment taking a sentence in vernacular English as a seed and Hawaiian (how vernacular, I don't know) as target language in the first part of an obvious loop:

Input in English: "Shut up, bitch!"

Translation to Hawaiian: "E noho mālie, e ka wahine!"

Input in Hawaiian: "E noho mālie, e ka wahine!"

Translation to English: "Be quiet, woman!"

I somehow find hard to believe that GT would produce anything like the inverse loop here.

This is mostly an observation, but any reflections are welcome.

An undisputed masterpiece of this type is O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez or ““The New Guide of The Conversation in Portugese and English”,  first printed in 1855, and later republished under the title “English as She Is Spoke” in 1883.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke

It is attributed to a pair of Portugese authors called Pedro Carolino and Jose Da Fonseca, neither of whom were overburdened with any great knowledge of English. Pedro Carolino in particular who did much of the translation was said to have possessed no grasp of English whatsoever, and dragged his idiomatic phrases through a pair of Portugese-French, and French-English  dictionaries, with entertaining results:

Dialogue 18 -

For to ride a horse’: ‘Here is a horse who have bad looks. Give me another. I will not that. He not sall know to march, he is pursy, he is foundered. Don’t you are ashamed to give me a jade as like? he is unshoed. he is with nails up.

The English idiom “A rolling stone gathers no moss” was mangled into “The stones as roll not heap up foam”

The Portugese idiom “Chover a canataro"  was rendered as “Raining in jars”  - as opposed to “Raining in buckets”.

Items of proverbial advice included:

- Dress your hairs.

- This hat go well.

- Undress you to.

- Exculpate me by your brother’s.

- She make the prude.

- Do you out the hairs?

- He has tost his all good.

Mark Twain who wrote the introduction to the 1883 edition said of English as She Is Spoke "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."

I recommend suing DeepL translate, it’s much more accurate

Albeit it may have less language options

4 hours ago, Sohan Lalwani said:

I recommend suing DeepL translate, it’s much more accurate.

My wife who is a proof-reader picked up on many amusing typos over the years. One was in an advertisement for a legal firm of solicitors due to be inserted into the copy for a theatre programme which read  -  “If you haven’t tried suing us before, why not start now !”

I tend to stress-test Google Translate quite a lot when doing lessons in Duolingo. One problem which often arises in the non-European language courses, is that the word bank in Duolingo simply doesn’t offer the word or script form you expected or needed. The only remedy is to fire-up Google Translate, and copy-paste the glyphs you need from there back into Duolingo, which often leads to variant translation issues and warnings.

The example below is from a Duolingo Chinese lesson this morning  - (quite why anyone would move a dishwasher into a bathroom, or need to discuss the matter in Chinese I have no idea !) The problem was that the Duolingo word bank did not wish to give me the characters 洗碗机 xi wan ji for  ‘dishwasher', and Google Translate wanted to use a different word  浴室 yùshi for a bathroom, rather than the one Duolingo expected —> 洗手间 xishǒujian  - ‘washroom’

You simply copy and paste out of Google Translate and hope for the best, and most of the time it does seem to work -  and does so in Japanese and Arabic as well.