it should be able to translate text not just by the word definition, but also context and conceptual meaning.
It has been doing that at least since 2016, and it’s using LLM-adjacent tech (transformer + RNN) since 2020. The problem is that it still seems to be doing things via English, which is especially problematic for single words with no context. In this example, “зачиняти” means “to close”. Google translates it to English as simply “close”, which loses the context of which meaning or even part of speech it is. Google then translates it to Japanese, but since the context is lost it assumes that “close” means “near” rather than “block an opening” and translates it as “chikai”.
(actually, Yandex Translate fucks this up as well and translates “зачиняти” as “黙れ” (shut up), which is somehow worse)
It has been doing that at least since 2016, and it’s using LLM-adjacent tech (transformer + RNN) since 2020. The problem is that it still seems to be doing things via English, which is especially problematic for single words with no context. In this example, “зачиняти” means “to close”. Google translates it to English as simply “close”, which loses the context of which meaning or even part of speech it is. Google then translates it to Japanese, but since the context is lost it assumes that “close” means “near” rather than “block an opening” and translates it as “chikai”.
(actually, Yandex Translate fucks this up as well and translates “зачиняти” as “黙れ” (shut up), which is somehow worse)
how about deepl.com? it’s been my go-to for a while but no idea how it performs on these langs
It translated correctly to 閉める
I have generally found it very good for Japanese, but I’ve only done Japanese <-> English pairing