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Linguaholic

Google Translate: frequency of translated words


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Google Translate started to provide frequencies for translated words probably in late 2019. Given a single word, the translated words are given 1 to 3 bars of frequency, which "Indicates how often a translation appears in public documents". It's a great feature! If anybody knows another dictionary that ranks the frequency of translated words, please let me know.

Here's my question. What does it mean if the translated word is not the most frequent and yet it's given as the default translation? For example, Source language: French. Target Language: English. French word: froisser. In the English textbox on the right, it shows crumple. But under this textbox are listed offend with 3 bars, crease 2 bars, crumple 2 bars, .... If offend more frequently appears as a translated word for froisser than crumple, why is crumple instead of offend the default translation? And, of the multiple words with 2 bars, why is crumple chosen instead of say crease?

If this message is off-topic, I apologize. I posted it to the Google Translate forum (https://support.google.com/translate/thread/62053485?hl=en) but I get no answer there.

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This feature is a double edged sword.
You can just write 大 in Google Translate, have it translated to English, you get "big".
But then you manually "correct" it to "shit", and repeat it 1000+ times on different VPN servers, and then Google Translate will tell you that the most correct translation for 大 is shit, even though that's not true at all.

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They don't.
AI is smart, but will never be superior to humans.
Because unlike AI, humans can be very unpredictable.

Humans give AI instructions, and the AI will just eat it.
AI gives humans instructions, and humans can either agree or disagree (and make changes if disagreed).

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  • 2 weeks later...

No.
A translation AI is adjusting based on human input, the human doesn't necessarily knows this, and the AI learns from everyone.
SEO on the other hand is a way for the search spider to find your website more easily, random users can't tell the spider what to find, however only website owners (and Google and their censors to add some hidden facts in it) can lead it into the right (or wrong) direction.

Plus in Google search there's a search bubble, lots of political manipulation (even though their TOS explicitely states that there's no way they will manipulate your political opinions, but Google is world famous for violating their own rules and getting away with it), lots of propaganda promotion (like putting CNN, Fox, etc. more visible), etc., it's all algorithms, but not quite the same as Google Translate.

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