Has Google Translate been fixed yet?

Not related to the issue raised in the article, but using a translation tool for individual words is going to give you the wrong answer in many situations by definition. The meaning of a word depends on its context.

For translating a single word, a dictionary that lists all possible meanings in the target language is the right tool. A translator (human or algorithm) can only guess or give you the list of possible translations. Google Translate has come up with a suitable proxy solution by adding the "More Translations" pane.

I'm a Western who has lived in Taipei for almost three years. I use Google Translate every day of my life. It's helped me book restaurant reservations and talk to my doctor.

I also grew up in Canada, have British parents, and lived in the USA for seven years, so I'm used to switching from "Traditional English" to "Simplified English" too ;-)

I mean, ya, sometimes Google Translate uses Mainland China words (e.g., I just typed Bicycle and it returned 自行車 instead of 腳踏車). But I just tried typing 土豆片 (potato chips) and translating it to "English" and it returned "potato chips" instead of the British "crisps" too. This is not a big deal at all.

I was in Taiwan and trying to direct a cab. I looked up the words left and right.

It translated to left and correct.

What followed was the driver asking me “left or right?” And me saying “correct!” And he would turn left in confusion I would start shouting “correct correct” while getting more frustrated. He was like “great I’m doing good” while I was pointing the other way.

Good times I eventually had a chat with him and looked up “turn right” after driving around a block twice using left turns lol

I'd say perhaps 5 or so of the ~100 entries on the list are somewhat debatable. The rest seems pretty obvious and indisputable, and among these I would count the "通過"/"透過" that you mentioned. If anything, perhaps the whole list is too focused on the IT lexicon. But it's pretty much solid work, doesn't really deserve a "mixed opinion" - in my opinion.

> Really? Do you really want to translate mega to 百萬 (million) in any context?

Would its use as a metric prefix not be a correct context for this?

Honest question, why haven't china moved to a western (?) alphabet based writing? With my ignorant knowledge, it seems crazy that you are using that way of writing today. Using 24 letter combinations vs memorizing 3000 (min) to 20.000 icons!

When I was a kid, my best friend was chinese, and we could never do anything on saturdays because he had to go to a school to learn chines, and how to write in chinese was very hard and time-consuming.

Do you know? Care to explain?

EDIT: I am not from the US, but from Argentina.

EDIT2: I am talking about the effort to learn how to draw (not only read but draw!) very complex looking 3000 icons vs. the effort of learning 24/26 and some rules. With a western language, by just knowing a few pronunciation rules, you can read any word. At least in Spanish. I am not implying that Chinese are bad, or that the language should die or anything like that.

Chinese generally has two writing systems: traditional and simplified. In the 1950s to 1980s mainland China developed simplified chinese in a bid to make the language easier to write. Note that these are just different ways of writing the same characters: think cursive versus block. They are not different languages -- the vocabulary and grammar can be identical.

Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and to one degree or another in various Chinese immigrant communities around the world. Taiwan is obviously the 800 pound gorilla here.

Taiwan has come to develop its own style of written Chinese -- think US vs British English but more nationalistic. So the question is: when Google Translate converts to traditional characters should it also be translating into Taiwan's written patois [not to be confused with the Taiwanese dialect]? After all, Google Translate does not differentiate between Britain and the US in English (it sadly uses British). And there are other groups which use traditional without this patois (Hong Kong, say, though likely not for long), albeit in fewer numbers.

The author does have one really good point, and that is that Google Translate is mistakenly describing traditional as zh-TW, that is "traditional as used in Taiwan". As long as it insists on doing that, it should also be translating into Taiwan's written patois. But what it should be doing instead is describing traditional as zh-Hant.

"Traditional characters" and "Simplified characters" are writing systems, not languages. You can write many variants of Chinese with either system.

Traditional characters are still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, while simplified characters are standard on the mainland and in Singapore. However, traditional characters are still used in some niche cases on the mainland (such as decorations, names of shops and restaurants).

Whether a translation to "Traditional characters" should default to Taiwanese-flavored Mandarin is an open question.

I don't think the downvotes are fully justified and I think it's a valid point to make. Taiwan itself for example for the longest time had an extremely unintuitive local pinyin version. They are at least no longer as strict in enforcing it versus the now official one that came from the Mainland. It is sometimes the cause for going the wrong place in Uber trips.

However, it is worth noting that there was basically an iron curtain between China and Taiwan for a long time after Chiang Kai-shek went there. A lot of IT terminology for example developed separately in Taiwan and China, so a lot of technical terms are different. The following website lets you look up scientific terms and convert them between china mainland and taiwenese.

https://terms.naer.edu.tw/

> Or is this "traditional Chinese" a language spoken

It's not a spoken language. It's only for written text.

> only in Taiwan?

Only in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and oversea Taiwanese/HK communities.

British vs. American English seems like a good analogy given that they also have distinct language codes. Would Google translate camión to lorry vs. truck depending on en-GB vs. en-US?

> Ignorant person here (sorry if I'm asking a dumb question), but given the larger population of China to Taiwan, why is that not the correct thing to do? Or is this "Traditional Chinese" a language spoken only in Taiwan?

They addressed this:

> NOTE: The Google Translate menu only says "Chinese (Traditional)". However, if you pick the option, you will see the language code reflected in the URL is zh-TW, which means "Traditional Chinese as being used in Taiwan". The alternative option for Google to fix this problem is to officially drop zh-TW support and switch to an appropriate language code instead, such as zh-Hant.

> given the larger population of China to Taiwan

Taiwan is its own country. India has a similar population to China. Why not just translate into Urdu or Tamil instead, by that logic?

It's incorrect per the language code they're using, zh-tw. They obviously side with the CPC on political issues, but that's a separate issue, they should just change the code to the more accurate "zh-Hant." zh-tw exists to specifically identify Taiwanese Mandarin, which is a defined separate dialect (we really should stop using "Chinese" as a word to describe the various flavors of Mandarin, let alone including entirely different languages (NOT dialects!) such as Hakka, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Ninghainese, etc).

If, as you are claiming, the Taiwanese don't have their own Taiwanese Mandarin, with their language being just the same as the Mandarin used in China, how can it be that at the same time they also don't get to have a say in what constitutes the "standard" of that "common" language they share with the "mainland?"

Also, there is no reason for constantly calling it "Mainland China" where you could just as well call it "China," unless it is to further a political agenda.

Anyway, this is all beside the point. The concept of a "standard" language is political not linguistic. If Google is run as a business, not a political entity, their linguistic choices should reflect the language actually being used in any given market, and not be based on purported "standards" promulgated elsewhere. The same simple concept that somehow already works well for other language pairs that could be construed as similar to the point of being the same should also be applied here.

> Google could allow one to select the writing system

I'm not sure their models have a concept of writing systems. I noticed that neither Google Translate nor DeepL understand the equivalence of katakana and hiragana in Japanese. Probably every character is just an independent token to them.

To clarify, "Standard Chinese" is the English term to describe the official language of the PRC. There is no country called "mainland," nor is there a country called "mainland China," nor is there a language that can be accurately called "Chinese."

It's much more clear in Mandarin itself, such as 官話. Note that some might translate this as "Traditional Chinese," separate from the typical meaning, when trying to separate "simplified characters" from "traditional characters." In English it's all a mess.

Also, you can write guanhua or beifanghua or "Standard Chinese" in both Simplified and Traditional charactersets. They are almost 1:1. You also used to be able to write Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, and other languages in Traditional Chinese characters.

That's why we should be careful to separate Guanhua ("Standard Chinese") from Taiwanese Mandarin and etc. imo using the word "Chinese" in the descriptor just sows further confusion and in fact furthers the political goals of the CPC to cast a political blanket over all things even remotely descriptive as "Chinese," be they language, culture, race, heritage, or nationality.

Google maps is particularly useless in this sense. I desperately wish they'd open source it so local could just add features as needed. In Taiwan, we don't have "highway," "motorcycle roads," etc, as Google understands it (with its notoriously difficult to activate "motorcycle route option"). There's specific rules that should be just implemented by name, flags like "no flower road," "no highspeed highway (red plate and car OK, yellow and below not ok)", no "highspeed highway (red, yellow, car ok, white and green plate not ok)," or maybe just "white scooter only" or even "greenplate only" routes modes. Better if you could just input your exact vehicle type per Taiwan law and get a legal route that way. The information is quite available on data.gov.tw for those that want to have machines read it. Can't speak for other countries.

This on top of the fact that I'm pretty sure google maps uses some USA centric constant for traffic light timer estimations. Traffic light timers are very, very long in Taiwan compared to other countries. One time I had to wait 500 seconds (they had to add an extra big countdown timer to account for this). Usually it's more than 99 (the maximum the 2 digit counters can display). When you're in a car, motorcycle, or scooter, it's safe to multiply travel times by 1.5x to 2x. As for bicycle, I have no idea why google thinks bicycling is so fast in Taipei, but always multiply by at least 2x whatever time Google tells you.

Edit: the 500 seconds was an extreme outlier. Around 99 seconds is the usual in major Taipei intersections.

Google Maps did make you do anything. It's a dumb tool that is not always correct made by people in USA. You decided to forgo basic due diligence in a foreign country.

It doesn't support Traditional Chinese though, let alone the Taiwanese dialect...

Seems better but it's definitely easy to spot when something has been machine translated, even when using DeepL. Did a test now and if you translate from English into a target language, the corresponding text is definitely not the way a native speaker would formulate it.