Posts That Spurs Massive Reactions Among Filipinos

One of the barriers to effective communication is cultural and language differences. I think it is still applicable that we should also regularly indulge in self-reflection on our speaking or communication abilities. Very recently this original post-https://noise.cash/post/16289j8k and a follow-up post-https://noise.cash/post/lgp62z62 of user u/noise.cash at 'noise.cash', spurs discussions mostly among Filipinos coming from the Philippines and other parts of the world. The former is a long post translated into Tagalog (one of the major languages used in the Philippines), while the latter is a clarificatory post 'sounds' pointing finger to Google Translate. There were minor glitches in the translation and a little bit funny on some terms (in Tagalog) used, however, I think is still comprehensible that its message is very clear. On the other hand, looking into user reactions, I found that generally inclined to point fingers at the inefficiencies of Google Translate. There's even one user that suggested another online translation tool, in lieu of Google Translate as an effective alternative. So, I did a little and short experimentation of online translation tools. 

This article focuses on the reactions of the users and my little experiment of various free online translation tools. 

Reactions and Comments

Reactions and responses were varied. Some express gratitude for the noise.cash effort of reaching them, others also are pointing to the inefficiencies of Google Translate, while others are having fun of some funny glitches of a mistranslation of some terms.

Online Free Translator Services And My Experiments
I searched online and found some online free machine translation services. I mean translation services that the underlying capability to translate is based on certain algorithms in the domain of natural language processing (NLP). I’ll just consider two (2) of them:

1. Translation Service
   Google Translate
   Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service created by Google that allows users to translate text, documents, and websites between languages. Google Translate was first published in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation (SMT) service, and it is a complementary translation service created by Google. But switching to a neural machine translation engine – Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) – in November 2016, which translates whole sentences at a time, rather than piece by piece or word for word.

Yandex Translate

Yandex Translate is a free translation web service application. For this service, Yandex developed a self-learning statistical machine-translation method. Just like Google Translate in its early days. Centered on the study of millions of translated texts, the method creates a dictionary of single-word translations. The machine compares the text to a dictionary of words before attempting to decode it. The algorithm then applies the text and the base language models to try to figure out what a word means in context. Yandex Translate moved to a hybrid approach in September 2017, integrating both computational and neural network translation models.

1. My Experiment

I commented in one of the posts of u/noise.cash as an appreciation of the noise.cash just to reach Filipino audiences to convince them to adhere to the noise.cash rules.

My post goes this way:

This is I appreciate your patience in giving advice on things that you can't do here at 'noise.cash' so that brief posts here will be pleasant and relevant.

Next, I personally translated it in Tagalog: 

Pinahahalagahan ko po ang inyong matiyagang pagpapahiwatig sa mga bagay na dapat gawin at hindi dapat gawin dito sa 'noise.cash' upang magiging kaaya-aya at makabuluhan ang mga maikling lathala dito.

(Note: Tagalog is one of the local languages in the Philippines spoken by a majority of the People)

Next, I personally translated it in Cebuano:

Gipabilhan nako ang inyong walay puas nga pagpaningkamot nga ipahibalo ang pwede ug dili pwedeng himoon dinhi sa 'noise.cash' aron nga mahimong nindot ug makahuluganong ang mga gipakatag nga mukbong pahibalo.

(Cebuano is another local language in the Philippines spoken also by many, I think 2nd largest regional language) Next, I used the above-mentioned translation services, but, this is how online machine translator work from Tagalog to English,

1. Google Translate:

“I appreciate your patient hints on the do’s and don’ts here at noise.cash so that the short posts here will be pleasant and meaningful.”

1. Yandex Translate:

“I appreciate your patient expression on things to do and should not be done here in the noise.cash to be pleasant and meaningful are the short published here.”

Which translation do you think is closer to the original thought? Take a look at some responses in my post.

Disclaimer, this is not an endorsement of any of the above services.

My Thoughts Sketch

Online translation services are also machine and trained based on various models in translating text from various languages. Of course, it is not perfect. Given the nature of the language that will evolve over time, even Google at first is hesitant to rectify grammatical errors of the resulting translations. Whatever services are available, I think the results are comparable to each other. In the long run, algorithms of the above services will be improved as it learned every day, that’s how AI works.

[Lead Image by Heejin Jeong from Pixabay ]

Thank you!