Monday, June 3, 2019

Do you still believe in Google Translate?


I took an Arabic Bible, Matthew 28, to check how to say the name of the Holy Trinity in Arabic.

Sorry to say, Google translate provided no pronunciation guide and my reading capacity for Arabic alphabet is rusty.

Now, while I tried Google translate for that purpuse, I was taking "detect language" to English. It detected the language Sindhi, and then I first thought the translation was from Arabic, and that the Arabic Bible had been hacked. No, I switched to Arabic to English and it seems satisfactory:



And next I switched back to document my shock:



In other words, Google translate does not show any knowledge of the difference between Arabic and Sindhi, since incapable of differentiating between the two.

I try it once again, taking "Arabic" to "Detect language" - not to Sindhi per se - and here is the result:



And once again, I manually correct to Arabic.



Ah, the passage is somewhat longer than the first one, but obviously, the problem is, in Sindhi a sequence of letters reminiscent of an Arabic message from St. Matthew has sufficient similarity to a Sindhi message meaning something else, let's try to detect what it is:



I think anyone familiar with Arabic will know what differs between the versions in Arabic script, but even I can see there is a visual difference.

I think I have once again illustrated that computers don't understand even if they process things whereof the only use to us is understanding. Precisely as an abacus can process mathematical problems, but cannot understand mathematics./HGL

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