About Google Translate

#1

If you’re not interested in my foreword, just skip to the 2 questions section…

1 foreword

I’ve been learning TiddlyWiki since the basic version, unfortunately still stuck at the beginner level.
Due to my poor English, I have been reading tiddlywiki.com articles through Google Translate and editing them into Chinese version,.
In 2016, the owner of tiddlywiki.cn gave up the domain name, and I had an idea: why not share Chinese version of tiddlywiki.com?
After getting the official consent of TW, I released tiddlywiki.cn .

But , my work gradually lost its meaning.
Because in just a few years, Google has achieved an astonishing 98% accuracy in translating English into Chinese!
For some paragraphs containing terminology, Google translated sentences even smoother than mine.

From a technical point of view, Chinese users can already directly access and read tiddlywiki.com with the help of Google Translate.
But at present, because the Great Firewall restricts access to tiddlywiki.com, it is necessary to keep tiddlywiki.cn for a while.
Since Google Translate is good enough, all I have to do is move tiddlywiki.com from the outside to the inside of the wall, and then hand over everything to google.

  1. The problem I have now

Google Chrome has a translate button, but it has two drawbacks:
(1) You need to click once every time you open a tiddler.
(2) Appears only when the language of the web page is different from the language of the system.

The effect I want is: No need for visitor intervention at all, and Google Translate will automatically work silently as soon as the website is opened.

I tried adding the Google Translate toolbar to the TW page, so that the user only has to select the language once when entering the site.
But this creates a new problem:
Because the js file of the toolbar requests some files from google.com, and google.com is forbidden by the Great Wall Firewall,This makes TW very slow to load, and the toolbar loses some page elements.

Is there a way to make TW do: automatically execute chrome’s translate button whenever a tiddler is opened?

Another problem is Google’s translation of tiddler.
Google stubbornly corrects the “tiddler” in the sentence to “fiddler” and then translates it.
This self-righteous mistake would have been trivial, but it was fatal to TW. All “titles of tiddler” are translated as “Fiddler’s Title” or “Chief Fiddler”, one can imagine the confusion it brings to visitors…

Multilanguage Wiki - Found a solution, but need help for improving it
How to translate JSON frim Russian in to English?
#2

Major achievement!

I’m not sure. That would likely require a JavaScipt programmer to know?

I do not know, but @saqimtiaz might?

Best wishes, TT

#3

Hi @list thank you that is very interesting, particularly to know that the quality of automated translations has reached that level.

One potential solution is to Google’s online website translation tool, rather than that of Chrome. It solves the problem of automatically translating newly opened tiddlers:

https://translate.google.co.uk/?sl=auto&tl=zh-CN&op=websites

I’m not sure if the resulting URL is shareable, but I got this:

https://tiddlywiki-com.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=zh-CN&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

The other approach that may be possible would be for the tiddlywiki.com automated build process to invoke the Google Translate API to produce a translation alongside the ordinary build.

4 Likes
#4

Lovely! This can translate to Persian and other languages!
The Persian Tiddlywiki looks nice and the quality of translation is acceptable :sweat_smile:

1 Like
#5

That’s crazy … It actually makes sense. I didn’t expect that.

https://tiddlywiki-com.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=de&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

@Mohammad … can you share your link too?

1 Like
#6

https://tiddlywiki-com.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=ml&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Here goes Malayalam :smiley:

Edit: Are we going off topic here?

#7

Hi Mario,
This is Persian.
https://tiddlywiki-com.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=fa&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Yes, that is really crazy!

Note: Persian, Arabic, Hebrew are RTL languages. Google does the translation nicely. We do not expect to make the translated TW right to left :wink:

image
image1899×840 270 KB

1 Like
#8

Thanks jeremyruston!

This method works very well, and I have tried this method before, but accessing translate.goog in China requires a VPN, which is quite difficult for ordinary Chinese visitors.

Regardless of this special situation in China, I suggest using Google Translate to add language selection to tiddlywiki.com. I believe this will greatly promote the popularization of TW.

In my experience, Google Translate has been pretty perfect. You don’t need to know all languages to verify this: first translate the English TW into a language, and then translate the result to English, and you will find that the sentence is still smooth…except for the word “tiddler”.

At least research how many people have this need.

#9

It’s interesting that Google, located in the U.S., doesn’t recognize “tiddler” as a term, even though it is a dictionary word. What does translate do with “tiddler” in Chinese? Does it literally use a term that means “one who plays a fiddle” ? And how does it know to translate it back as “fiddler” and not “violinist”? I’m not even sure what the difference between a violin and fiddle is.

#10

If you query the word “tiddler” alone, Google Translate will give the Chinese “鲰”, which is a very uncommon Chinese character, but the meaning is very accurate.
Once “tiddler” is in the sentence, I’m guessing Google is using an algorithm to correct spelling mistakes, and he thinks “Tiddler” is a typo for “Fiddler”?

#11

I’ve been having some success using the GPT-3 AI language model for translation tasks. In particular, the “prompt” can include instructions for translating specific words and phrases.

For example, I entered the following prompt:

Translate the following into Chinese (traditional). Translate the word “tiddler” as “鲰”.

The purpose of recording and organising information is so that it can be used again. The value of recorded information is directly proportional to the ease with which it can be re-used.

The philosophy of tiddlers is that we maximise the possibilities for re-use by slicing information up into the smallest semantically meaningful units with rich modelling of relationships between them. Then we use aggregation and composition to weave the fragments together to present narrative stories.

TiddlyWiki aspires to provide an algebra for tiddlers, a concise way of expressing and exploring the relationships between items of information.

GPT-3 responded with:

記錄和組織信息的目的是為了能夠再次使用它們。記錄信息的價值與重複使用它們的便利性成正比。

鲰的哲學是，我們通過將信息切割成最小的語義上有意義的單元，並對它們之間的關系進行丰富的建模，以最大限度地提高重複使用的可能性。然后，我們使用聚合和組合來織接片段，呈現故事叙述。

TiddlyWiki 致力于為鲰提供一種代數，這是一種表達和探索信息項之間關系的簡潔方式

It’s definitely using the character 鲰.

The implementation I use is below; it requires registration:

#12

When I try the google online translate, converting the Philosophy text to Chinese, I get a last sentence that appears to be in Vietnamese:

Jìlù hé zǔzhī xìnxī de mùdì shì wèile kěyǐ zàicì shǐyòng tā. Jìlù xìnxī de jiàzhí yǔqí chóngfù shǐyòng de nányì chéngdù chéng zhèngbǐ.

But … Google can’t translate it. So no idea what it says. It seems like Google translate has a language “leak”.

Screenshot:

image
image1263×399 105 KB

#13

This is Chinese phonetic notation, not Vietnamese. :grinning:

#14

I think Vietnamese has fewer words longer than 3 or 4 characters :nerd_face:

#15

Ah, I see. I should have known a bug that big couldn’t have slipped through. In my defense, it was Google translate that identified the text as Vietnamese.

#16

All,

There are great possibilities here, for something I can’t keep to myself. If you take these translation mechanism’s and combine them with the dictation tools that listen and convert your voice to text (in different languages) we may be able to make tiddlywiki a great tool for practicing if not learning a language.

  • One of the hardest parts of learning another language is learning to speak it to others, it can be so embarrassing.
  • When you speak someone else’s language badly it grates on them, when you get it right they rarely confirm this, as they just consider you are speaking.
  • To learn anything you need to put a lot of time into it.
  • Most native speakers are not good teachers, even of their own language.

So consider this, you must be able to read and vocalise, if not understand the language you are learning, eg French.

  • Find something in English you want to say in French and speak it into a dictation tool as a French speaker, now translate it to English and see if it is close to what you intended in your language.
  • Dictate/Type something in English and translate it to French
  • Use a French text reader to hear the French
  • Read the French into tiddlywiki using the French dictation,
    • how closely does it resemble the written French?
    • Translate it back to English, is the meaning correct
  • Read the French news into the dictation and see if it looks the same as you read it.

Importantly here this will have errors and mistakes, this is about practice, with your ears and voice not the technicalities of the language you are learning but if may importantly fill a GAP in the learning process, and for free!

What do you think?

#17

Another challenge is to check grammar, style, and spell when we learn a new language.

Recently, I start to use languagetool through server in localhost. Local server lets me more comcomfortable about privacy and security comparing with other online tools (e.g. , grammarly).

LT is perfectly working with TiddlyWiki.

#18

The embarrassing thing is that when I use Google Translate, when I do some special operations in tiddlywiki, I always get some tiddlywiki pop-up error prompts

image
image1229×324 32.3 KB
image
image1054×431 109 KB

#19

Try it on another wiki, browser and see if it relates to your wiki, the browser or the content.

  • Then you can do some further analysis to see what may be causing it.
#20

Is this neotw? It has 30 non-official plugins, and about 10 official plugins. You could make a version with no special plugins and see if it has the error. Then, when there are no errors, add plugins one-by-one until the error occurs. Then you’ll know where the error is happening.