ProZ.com Translation Forums

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | Spanish again

Maria Laura Curzi — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 16:49:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: Maria Laura Curzi
Post title: Spanish again

Another common error easy to spot in AI MT is in the way adverbs ending in “ly” (manner adverbs in Spanish) are all translated in one monotonous way, using the “mente” suffix.

No creativity, no use of adverbial phrases, no metaphors.
Then, I have read some crazy new adverbs ending in “mente” that are also used together in groups of two or three like in a description, a funny way that I never heard in humans.

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | The dead giveaway is when

Daryo — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 22:51:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: Daryo
Post title: The dead giveaway is when

The dead giveaway is when on some 'localised' website you find individual words, (or occasionally groups of words) left simply untranslated by some MT software suffering from a bad case of 'indigestion'.

Especially ridiculous when in the middle of some garbled 'translation into Serbian' - in Cyrillic - you find a word in English, showing that someone's blind faith in MT (and/or penny pinching) went as far as inflicting an unredacted and unchecked MT output on what they expect to be their 'new market'.

Yeah sure, no better way to win friends, I mean new clients.

[Edited at 2025-01-28 23:12 GMT]

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | In Afrikaans

Samuel Murray — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:12:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: Samuel Murray
Post title: In Afrikaans

1. Google Translate inserts an invisible control character in some sentences.
2. Unnatural compound nouns, e.g. studie + dokter = studiesdokter (no human would do that).
3. Dutch-style compound-S, e.g. Dutch adds compoung-S after an existing S, while Afrikaans never does that.
4. Illogical translations, e.g. if a list of items contains multiple items that have identical translations in Afrikaans, the machine translated list will contain two of the same words. (That said, I've seen some human translators actually do this!!)

From Afrikaans to English: companies are male in Afrikaans. "It was a pleasure working for him" (i.e. for the company).

[Edited at 2025-01-27 13:33 GMT]

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | Example

Zea_Mays — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 10:19:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: Zea_Mays
Post title: Example

Have you ever used Google Translate integrated into Facebook? ...

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | Spanish

Maria Laura Curzi — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 16:16:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: Maria Laura Curzi
Post title: Spanish

[quote]Gennady Lapardin wrote:

When people reply 'definitely', I'd like to know how exactly, based on which criteria, they sort out machine errors and human errors, repeat, sort out the errors only [/quote]

In Spanish, it could be from flagrant inconsistencies:
* on gender,
* on plural of verb's conjugations,
* on dates/numbers format.

Also, on wrong verb tenses and wordiness.

And I won't start to tell about vocabulary/grammar that is not used in certain Spanish variants, and it's the *only* option machines use/have in their LLM database and most of the time makes no sense if the reader isn't born and raised in Spain.

[Edited at 2025-01-26 20:11 GMT]

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | Creativity

expressisverbis — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 12:55:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: expressisverbis
Post title: Creativity

I think the most blatant difference is the lack of creativity on the side's of machines.
It generally struggles with tasks that only humans can handle it: idiomatic expressions, tone and style, localisaton, transcreation, capacity to solve ambiguous terms/expressions in a given context.
However, there are also human translators who lack a lot of creativity.

[Edited at 2025-01-26 12:55 GMT]

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | Not errors

Charlie Bavington — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 12:43:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: Charlie Bavington
Post title: Not errors

[quote]Gennady Lapardin wrote:

based on which criteria [/quote]

I didn't reply "definitely", and it's not really a question of errors in the French-English material I've seen.
But MT always translates "plusieurs" as "several", when "more than one" or "a number of" is often better, and always "ainsi que" as "as well as" when often "and" is all that is needed.
However, I've seen humans who do the same.
There are other similar signs but those two always spring to mind.

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | Most likely

Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 12:23:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Post title: Most likely

Portuguese grammar is a mine field, especially with regard to plurals, gender and verb conjugation…

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | No answer possible - question is too vague

Zea_Mays — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 12:19:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: Zea_Mays
Post title: No answer possible - question is too vague

What machine translations are meant? Of complete texts or of single sentences?
Based on my experience, the more the source text is complex and context sensitive, the more machine translations are recognisable as such.

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | Absolutely

Lingua 5B — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 11:46:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: Lingua 5B
Post title: Absolutely

The kind of mistakes a machine makes could never be made by a human. Humans make different kinds of errors.

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | compounds and pronouns

Johan Beyens (X) — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 10:30:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: Johan Beyens (X)
Post title: compounds and pronouns

At least in my language, Dutch, there are 2 dead giveaways:
- incorrectly translated compound words (incorrect insertion of spaces, incorrect morpheme sequence)
- pronouns not taking into account the grammatical gender of their referent

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations? | Sometimes

Gennady Lapardin — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 08:36:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: Gennady Lapardin
Post title: Sometimes

When people reply 'definitely', I'd like to know how exactly, based on which criteria, they sort out machine errors and human errors, repeat, sort out the errors only

Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?

ProZ.com Staff — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 20:10:05 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?
Poster: ProZ.com Staff

This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Can you identify differences between human and machine translations?".

View the poll results »