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Google translate, a possible revolution. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4848 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 9 of 34 07 March 2013 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Any ideas on a decent speech synthesizer? I've been looking for one.
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| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5784 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 10 of 34 08 March 2013 at 12:16am | IP Logged | |||||
What pronoun did (s)he get wrong? If you mean "meh", it may not be a misspelling of "me" but rather an attempt to render a certain sound in English. At least that's how I read it. If I'm right it indicates a kind of "you may be right but I doubt it and at any rate even if you are right it doesn't really make any difference to what I'm trying to say but I can't be bothered to argue the point" attitude. Well, that's not quite right, but it's the best I can do. You'd know it if you heard it. Hopefully the OP will correct me if I'm wrong and they really did spell "me" wrong. Edit: wish I'd thought to explain it with a video like Chung :-( Cheers Chung. :-) Edited by Random review on 08 March 2013 at 12:37am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 11 of 34 08 March 2013 at 12:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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Meh indeed has that somewhat dismissive/contemptuous attitude, but with an occasionally joking undertone.
I also interpreted it as that interjection rather than a mispelling of the 1st person singular in its oblique form. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 12 of 34 08 March 2013 at 5:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Norwegian to English
and Russian to English are pretty readable. Japanese to English, or Chinese to English, or Tamil to English are not. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4773 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 13 of 34 08 March 2013 at 7:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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Here's a humorous article about word usage on the Internet, with some interesting insights on "meh" in the second entry (sixth in the countdown).
In addition to the doubts expressed by others, I'd like to additionally stress how unreliable GT's speech synthesiser is for Japanese in particular. Due to the nature of the Japanese writing system the same character can be read in several wildly different ways. With common words this isn't even an issue, but if you put in sentences with some advanced vocabulary things may get wonky, like the numerous times I had where the transliteration below gave one reading and the speech synthesizer gave a completely different one. Sometimes one of them is so hilariously off that you know which one to go with, but often the two readings are perfectly legit words, so you're left wondering which one of them fits the context better, or if they are indeed interchangeable. And when it gets to personal names all bets are off. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4652 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 14 of 34 08 March 2013 at 8:35am | IP Logged | |||||
I use something called Acapela Text to Speech. Works with many languages, so far I've only used Arabic. And I use Google Translate to get the gist of what Sarah wrote on FB. To check *individual* words, I use Bing or Google Translate. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 34 08 March 2013 at 9:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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I also use the Acapela box, which covers a lot of languages and often has the choice of several speakers. For Irish I use Abair.ie, but when these aren't available Google translate may be the only choice - at least among those I know (and which are free). As has been noted before there are vast differences in quality among the languages represented there, but with time I expect the bad ones to catch up. However I can only use these synthethizers when I'm at my computer, and because I have to feed them sentences I have to concentrate. Therefore having at least some languages represented on my telly is still important, and those I have got there are generally the ones I speak best.
The other side of Google translate is of course the translation mechanism itself, and I am a heavy user of that one - but for study purposes I never ever use the direction L1 --> L2 because I can't catch the errors there. And yes, there are errors. Not only slight misrepresentations or badly understood constructions, but sometimes it seems that some very common word totally hs eluded the thing and it keeps giving some totally wrong translation even with a changed context. With one word at a time some language combinations do give 'dictionary like' lists of possible transaltions, but even these aren't alwaus complete and adequate. In spite of this it is a valuable tool in the direction L2 -> L1 because most errors are fairly easy to spot if you have even a modest knowledge about the language beforehand. And yes, some combinations are worse than others. I can't vouch for the oriental languages, but anything with Latin is so bad as to be virtually useless - it seems that Google-Translate-Latin is completely baffled by the free wordorder of Latin AND the undeniable age of the text base, and it is rare that any sentence comes out correctly translated. With other combinations you have to watch out for dropped negations, miscalculated hierarchical structures and a weird tendency to insert other languages and place names instead of those in the original text - but what is the alternative? With Google translate I can produce bilingual texts from things I want to read about instead of having to limit myself to multilingual homepages or books with a translation (which then often is so free as to make it a pain in the a-thing to find any corresponding phrases). So yes, Google and its smaller competitors have reviolutionized at least my language learning. Edited by Iversen on 08 March 2013 at 9:55am 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5925 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 16 of 34 08 March 2013 at 10:05am | IP Logged | |||||
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I wouldn't use Google Translate as a major resource in language learning. The translations are okay if I want to translate from Spanish or Italian to English or Swedish to English, though it will only give me a vague idea of what the original text is about. You might also be be surprised at how quickly you could progress to a level of proficiency where GT will be useless. I would only use it for Romance and Germanic languages, as I learned very quickly not to trust GT at all for Finnish or Polish because it makes too many mistakes in these languages.
I don't like the synthesized voices for any language, including English. The sentences or phrases are read at an unnaturally slow speed and the pronunciation and prosody are usually so bad they make me laugh. Edited by mick33 on 09 March 2013 at 10:57pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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