I’ve used it a lot from German and Russian. I lived in Germany for a few years. Auto translation was absolutely essential for navigating official things like government websites, banking, flat renting, etc. Now, all of my in-laws are exclusive Russian speakers. When my partner isn’t around to translate, we use Google Translate’s conversation feature. It works great. My partner overhears a lot of our conversation. She’s never needed to clarify anything.
One day in the spring, at the hour of an unprecedentedly hot sunset, two citizens appeared in Moscow, at the Patriarch's Ponds. The first of them, dressed in a summer gray pair, was short, well-fed, bald, carried his decent hat with a pie in his hand, and on his well-shaven face were glasses of supernatural size in black horn-rimmed. The second, a broad-shouldered, reddish, swirling young man in a checkered cap twisted at the back of his head, was in a cowboy shirt, chewed white trousers and black slippers.
===
Human:
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At the sunset hour of one warm spring day two men were to be seen at Patriarch's Ponds. The first of them--aged about forty, dressed in a greyish summer suit--was short, dark-haired, well-fed and bald. He carried his decorous pork-pie hat by the brim and his neatly shaven face was embellished by black hornrimmed spectacles of preternatural dimensions. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with curly reddish hair and a check cap pushed back to the nape of his neck, was wearing a tartan shirt, chewed white trousers and black sneakers.
===
"шляпу пирожком" has been auto-translated to "hat with a pie" - ridiculous and inaccurate AI translation. It is only one of many, many examples.
The example above was from a random book. I knew AI is going to fail.
Machine translation isn’t for translating literature at the moment. Maybe that’s why you’re feeling it falls short. For conversational vernacular or straightforward instruction, it’s great. I can’t remember the last time I used pork-pie hat in a conversation, for instance.
Perhaps you could qualify your initial statement that we can’t translate literature in a way that isn’t ugly. That would be true. But machine translation is a huge asset every day to people in need of understanding important things in a foreign language. Quite a miracle really.
Yes, it is for trivial conversations. I could give you few more examples, technical book - you would say "ah, and it isn't for translating technical books", and so on.
And this is the reason why I'm not buying "the end of classical Computer Science". AI doesn't work with text very well (reference to your comment "Machine translation works pretty well" - no, it isn't), and often can't even translate/recognize conversations. For example, auto-generated YouTube CCs often suck.
> But look at Stable Diffusion. If you had taken a GAN a few years ago and looked at its generative art potential.
Art is a little bit different, since it's subjective, and artist can say "oh, I just see things this way". Fluctuations in an artwork can be always seen as features, not bugs.
With translations you have to be more precise. The same for Computer Science, you often need to understand nuances to do the precise work.
You're saying "few years", but I've started using auto-translating software at least 15 years ago, maybe even more than that. We had this progress 15 years ago: yes, we were able to auto-translate simple conversations.
It's constantly improving, but at the same time there is no breakthrough, and machine translation still sucks.
ML has shown more promise in MT than any classical algorithm. Unless you believe there is a fundamental limitation to ML, or a new frontier on the horizon in classical CS, I don’t see a path for classical CS to hold a candle to ML in the machine translation domain.
Also, I disagree that translations need be precise. I read a collection of short stories recently called the Icarus Gland. I highly recommend it, especially if you can read it in the original language (Russian). The translation was simply comical. Probably it mostly translated via MT. Yet, it was an amazing book.
I’m not really sure how machine translation being less than perfect is related to whether or not the end of classical is near. Unless your argument is that because ML based translation is bad now, it will never be good unless there are developments in classical CS. But look at Stable Diffusion. If you had taken a GAN a few years ago and looked at its generative art potential. You could make the same argument. State of the art ML (at the time) is not good at generative art, therefore classical CS is still relevant. Of course, we know know that’s not a true statement.
