I didn’t expect “using Google translate” to be a skill you could improve. This isn’t your average, everyday machine translation. This is advanced machine translation.
(Of course, Google could also botch the translation back to English and have two wrongs cancel out and look right, but still, the idea is pretty clever)
Well, it’s much like reading at different grade levels. For Google Translate, you have to simplify words a little bit to improve accuracy. I usually speak in a pretty formal tone, using reasonably advanced grammar and punctuation. I had to “dumb it down” a little, so that minimal nuance would be lost. That nuance gets lost in translation–you need to make sure your speech is very intentional, you know. For instance, it translates “I’m using Google Translate” to “I use Google Translate”. It’s a subtle change, but it matters a lot. Luckily, the brain fills in the gaps with enough context. Make sure enough of the comment makes sense, and the rest should just fall into place when being read.
That being said, there’s no way I’d translate the above paragraph to German, unless I was a speaker of the language, or had an actual translator. It’s just a bit too advanced. It’d probably be legible, but it’ll lose the intended writing style and the subtle mannerisms that I use, since, in a sense, Google Translate is pretty sterile. That’s where the skill comes into play, is actually changing the subtleties and mannerisms in your speech that you might not even realise is there.
Google translate is getting frighteningly good
I proofread a second translation back to English. Changed my sentences for maximum accuracy.
I didn’t expect “using Google translate” to be a skill you could improve. This isn’t your average, everyday machine translation. This is advanced machine translation.
(Of course, Google could also botch the translation back to English and have two wrongs cancel out and look right, but still, the idea is pretty clever)
Well, it’s much like reading at different grade levels. For Google Translate, you have to simplify words a little bit to improve accuracy. I usually speak in a pretty formal tone, using reasonably advanced grammar and punctuation. I had to “dumb it down” a little, so that minimal nuance would be lost. That nuance gets lost in translation–you need to make sure your speech is very intentional, you know. For instance, it translates “I’m using Google Translate” to “I use Google Translate”. It’s a subtle change, but it matters a lot. Luckily, the brain fills in the gaps with enough context. Make sure enough of the comment makes sense, and the rest should just fall into place when being read.
That being said, there’s no way I’d translate the above paragraph to German, unless I was a speaker of the language, or had an actual translator. It’s just a bit too advanced. It’d probably be legible, but it’ll lose the intended writing style and the subtle mannerisms that I use, since, in a sense, Google Translate is pretty sterile. That’s where the skill comes into play, is actually changing the subtleties and mannerisms in your speech that you might not even realise is there.