[HN Gopher] European word translator: an interactive map
___________________________________________________________________
European word translator: an interactive map
Author : gnabgib
Score : 258 points
Date : 2025-02-23 19:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ukdataexplorer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ukdataexplorer.com)
| enriquto wrote:
| Love that the numbers in Catalan are represented as numerals, not
| as words.
|
| EDIT: playing with it, it's a bit sad that large numbers do not
| work at all (in any language); and that not all common forms of a
| word are shown. For example, I tried to see how "ninety six" is
| said in french in France, Belgium and Switzerland, but it does
| not work.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| As a French, I always found that the way Wallons or Swiss word
| out numbers >69 makes way more sense than ours
| watwut wrote:
| As a no French, I love French numbers you dislike. 90 being 4
| 20 10 is something sort of awesome and funny.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| I often wondered if the fact your number system forces you to
| multiply somehow affects your mathematical competence. France
| has won a lot of Fields medals.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The English number system kind of also forces you to
| multiply. Ninety-six is nine tens plus six, or 9*10+6.
| French is just special because they randomly sneak in base
| 20. But I doubt they really think more about saying 4 score
| plus sixteen then you do about saying nine tens plus six.
|
| What is more influential (in a detrimental way) is German
| randomly switching reading direction. They read 2196 as
| 2000+100+6+90 instead of the more reasonable 2000+100+90+6
| lucb1e wrote:
| Dutch does that too, and I've tried out what happens if
| you say it correctly ("negentig 'n zes", ninety and six,
| instead of "zes 'n negentig")
|
| It takes a second to process and then they'll ask "do you
| mean [reverse order variant]?" so they do kinda get it
| and I think transitioning to the sane version could be
| possible without much trouble, but people would have to
| want to
| blahedo wrote:
| It's because if it's out of order, your "partial
| interpretation so far" in your head gets messed up. A
| relative of mine pulls a version of this in English (that
| I find hilarious): in American English we usually read
| phone numbers one digit at a time, but sometimes group
| pairs of digits, and it doesn't really matter because
| "forty five" and "four five" present in the same order.
| Their phone number has a 1 in it, so to prank people that
| are writing down or typing the number they read it as
| (numbers made up, but the effect is):
| five six seven four -teen
|
| ...
|
| and then cracks up. _I_ cracked up when it was done to
| me, although apparently not everyone finds it so funny.
| ;)
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| In France we read our numbers in pairs: 01 23 45 67 89.
| The initial zero is complicated, it is a butchered-up
| solution when we were transitioning the numbers and in an
| international context one never knows whether to say +33
| 0 1 23 45... or +33 1 23 45... (the latter one is
| correct, though both will likely work). When you remove
| the zero in the international version, lots of systems
| will format the number by triplets, which seems to be
| more common in Europe (+33 123 456 789)
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, _four-and-
| twenty_ blackbirds, baked in a pie...
|
| I had schoolteachers who still spoke like this in 1970s
| Yorkshire. I don't know if it was a regional dialect
| thing or a generational thing across all England, but
| among the over-40s back then it was still pretty common
| to hear German-style backwards numbers in English.
| moogly wrote:
| We can test your theory by checking how the Danes fared.
|
| https://blogs.transparent.com/language-
| news/2016/08/29/danis...
| Detrytus wrote:
| I once read an article claiming ghat Chinese are do good at
| math for two reasons:
|
| 1. Their words for Numbers are based on Base-10 system (so
| no nonsense such as ,,eleven" and ,,twelve")
|
| 2. Their words for Numbers are short, one syllabe, so they
| can keep more of them in their short term memory at once
|
| Not saying there's any truth to that, but sounds
| interesting
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| No, because nobody thinks 4*20+16 when saying 96, this is
| just a string in your head, without any links to 4, 20, 16.
| This is just a word like "ghdtehbdf"
| OptionOfT wrote:
| Growing in Belgium, we learned that our Walloon brethren use
| septante (70), quatre-vingts (4 * 20 or 80) and nonante (90).
|
| We never learned huitante (80), but here are apparently parts
| of Belgium that use is. We did learn soixante-dix and quatre-
| vingts-dix, and were allowed to use both. [0]
|
| The Swiss also use huitante, and Nova Scotia uses octante.
|
| [0]: Funnily enough, writing American English was a no-go. We
| had to write centre, colour, metre, lift (elevator), ticket
| (receipt).
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Ha, I only knew of octante, I dd not know there was a
| "huitante". I worked at CERN and it was octante.
| kozak wrote:
| Ukrainian and russian words often use the same letters but are
| pronounced very differently due to distinct phonetics. On the
| other hand, some Polish and Czech words sound the same or very
| similar to Ukrainian but look quite different because of their
| different alphabets. Therefore, phonetic transcription would be a
| valuable improvement.
| Falimonda wrote:
| I've been using phonetic transcriptions in a parallel text
| reader application I've been putting together. It seems like
| they go a long way in allowing a foreign language learner to
| internalize a word's pronunciation.
| reader9274 wrote:
| You immediately see the difference (or similarly) of languages
| when using words that are very old, such as "iron", or "stone",
| which are words that have existed from the origins of that
| language.
| lqet wrote:
| Also "cow". And "sun", "mama" and "papa" seem to transcended
| most European languages.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| salt, tea, ..
|
| one can follow migrations.. and criss-crosses..
|
| btw, "orange" as color in Bulgarian is still "orange"
| (oranzhev/a/o/i), but "orange" as fruit is _portokal_ (
| "portokal") - so that's tricky..
|
| "oranges" seems more correct, vs "orange color" maybe
| adrian_b wrote:
| Salt and tea are good examples for the 2 reasons that can
| be the cause for finding the same word in many languages.
|
| Salt is an ancient Indo-European word that was already in
| use several millennia ago, so it has been inherited in most
| Indo-European languages.
|
| Tea is a relatively recent borrowing in the European
| languages, which has spread from one language to another,
| with a few pronunciation variants, across all Europe,
| regardless of the genetic relationships between languages.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Poland took issue with the story that worldwide there are
| only two words for tee, and which one you use depends on
| whether you got introduced to tea via sea or via land
| adrian_b wrote:
| For some words, their identity is not obvious when you do not
| know the rules for the changes of sounds between the Indo-
| European language subfamilies.
|
| For instance "cow" and "Kuh" come from the same word as
| "boeuf" and "buey" (also despite the gender difference).
| retrac wrote:
| Mama and papa is a whole other phenomenon.
|
| Arabic: mama babi. Mandarin: mama baba. Swahili: mama baba.
| Inuktitut: anaana ataata. English: mama papa. Tamil: amma
| appa.
|
| These languages are not known to be related.
|
| The first vowel sound a child makes is approximately "a" and
| the first consonant they form tends to be a nasal plosive
| "mba mba mba" and the second distinct sound tends to be a
| dental or labial plosive "pa ta pa ta". And the first thing a
| baby says is "mommy" of course and the second thing a baby
| says is "daddy" of course. So mama is mommy and papa or tata
| is daddy. That's the usual explanation, anyway.
| oguz-ismail wrote:
| > Inuktitut: anaana ataata
|
| That's interesting. Ana/ata means mother/father in Turkic
| languages
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Check this out:
|
| https://polatkaya.net/Native_Americans.htm
| nedt wrote:
| I can mostly speak for German. It seems to mix them all into one
| general language. But there are a lot of local differences
| between north and south of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. And
| it's not just dialect, but really different words that might not
| be understood everywhere. If you look at the english part it has
| at least three different words. Similar in Spanish.
| lqet wrote:
| > And it's not just dialect, but really different words that
| might not be understood everywhere. If you look at the english
| part it has at least three different words. Similar in Spanish.
|
| I think you cannot really compare the minuscule differences
| between "Standard German", "Austrian Standard German", and
| "Swiss Standard German" to the differences between English,
| Irish and Welsh, which are not even from the same language
| family. Also, the tool is based on Google Translate, and AFAIK
| Google Translate doesn't differentiate between them.
|
| Comparing the tool to this map [0], it seems to do a pretty
| good job in capturing all major languages in Europe, while
| ignoring their dialects.
|
| But I agree that I would be great if you could zoom into the
| map and also show differences in local dialects. ChatGPT seems
| to be pretty good at translating to different variants of
| standard German, or German dialects [1]
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#/media/Fil...
|
| [1]
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67bba4db-9458-800c-b5f8-fd3fa196d4...
| wongarsu wrote:
| My best guess:
|
| - Swiss German and Austrian German didn't make the cut because
| Switzerland and Austria are on good terms with Germany and
| don't mind if we call their languages a dialect of German. Not
| only is that justification to exclude them, they are also not
| in Google translate for this reason (which this map uses)
|
| - Luxembourg did mind and went to great lengths to get their
| German dialect recognized as a separate language, is in Google
| translate, but Wikipedia lists them as only 300k speakers
|
| - Frisian is seen as a distinct language because of how
| different it is, is in Google translate, but has about 200k
| speakers
|
| - Similarly, Scottish Garlic is in Google translate has only
| 70k-200k speakers
|
| The map is consistent if you set the goal of only considering
| languages that are in Google translate and have at least 500k
| speakers.
|
| I do think these rules detract from the map. Frisian and
| Luxembourgish are interesting as "in-between" languages
| (Luxemburgish has a lot of French influence, Frisian is closer
| related to English). And Swiss German has many distinct words
| that are very different from their German counterparts, so for
| the purposes of this map it really should be a language.
| mrazomor wrote:
| IIUC, the Swiss German can't make a cut as there's no
| standard written form (and with it, not much resources), and
| the variations between the cities are pretty significant.
| lqet wrote:
| There really isn't a single "Swiss German" dialect. It is
| rather a family of dialects, and this family is again part
| of the larger family of "Alemannic German" dialects, which
| are spoken in most of southwestern Germany, Switzerland and
| western parts of Austria [0]. It is really very hard to
| clearly demarcate "Swiss German" from dialects spoken for
| example in the Black Forest, around the city of Freiburg im
| Breisgau, in Vorarlberg or even (historically) in Alsace.
| My own dialect is Swabian (also Alemannic), and I never had
| trouble understanding the local dialects around Basel,
| Berne or Zurich. It is easier for me to understand these
| Swiss German dialects than, for example, Bavarian dialects.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alemannic_German#/media/F
| ile:A...
| jajko wrote:
| As per some folks I've met (I live in french Romandie,
| almost 0 variation here they just speak slower than
| french), for ie folks from Zurich its almost impossible
| to understand folks from Bern. And thise are 2 big cities
| pretty close to each other, not some remote mountain
| valley.
|
| But they can easily switch to more modest verion or even
| high german if needed.
| Tainnor wrote:
| > for ie folks from Zurich its almost impossible to
| understand folks from Bern. And thise are 2 big cities
| pretty close to each other, not some remote mountain
| valley.
|
| This is absolutely not true. Bern is the capital and many
| people travel there for work or other reasons. It's also
| a dialect very heavily featured on TV (e.g. I remember
| there was a weather reporter from Bern, don't know if she
| still does this), a lot of famous politicians are/were
| from Bern (e.g. former Federal Council member Adolf Ogi)
| and many famous musicians also sang/sing in this dialect
| (Mani Matter, Zuri West, Gola, etc.)
|
| Almost all Swiss dialects are mutually intelligible
| simply due to the high level of exposure to the diversity
| (and also their relative similarity). There are some
| people who don't understand Walliserdeutsch well, because
| it's less represented and also linguistically more
| removed from the rest - but even that's something you get
| used to quickly.
| gwervc wrote:
| Alemannic is still spoken in Alsace. Albeit it has some
| of the same issue your listed: no standard written form
| (Hochdeutsch was used for that) and wide difference even
| between close villages. In particular, Northern and
| Southern varieties have a different vocalic systems.
| smatija wrote:
| Similiar to Slovenian - we have 400 dialects, grouped in
| 7 larger groups based on similarity. Given that there is
| only like 2 million speakers that may feel like a large
| number, but it's a consequence of rather hilly geography.
|
| Differences between some of them are rather extreme,
| especially Prekmurje dialects feel like their own
| language - so we need to fallback to "book" Slovenian
| when talking with people from different regions.
| bradrn wrote:
| I think for 'Scottish Garlic' you meant 'Scottish Gaelic'...
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| It's hilarious that an English language website has so many
| enthusiasts for the regional differences of their favourite
| foreign languages while all pretending that English is
| monolithic and consistent everywhere. Try driving around the
| north of England for an hour or two and see how many
| different words for bread roll you encounter. Baps, barm
| cakes, oven bottom muffins...
| lqet wrote:
| In my experience, people mostly tend to hyperbolize the
| differences between their local dialect and "everything
| else" for patriotic reasons. Usually, they give some
| singular words that are vastly different as examples (I
| suspect you can find such examples in most languages and
| most regions), and ignore that 99% of the vocabulary, plus
| the grammar and most daily sentence constructs, are
| equivalent (modulo the accent). A standard example in
| German is how the outermost bread slice is called, which
| differs completely from region to region, town to town, and
| sometimes even family to family [0].
|
| [0] https://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/...
| ttepasse wrote:
| For an example take a look at this map of the different words
| used in German for "meatballs":
|
| https://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-7/f01f/
| iamkonstantin wrote:
| Same for Belgium, Google/Apple translate has never been able to
| correctly translate French and Dutch for us while our
| vocabulary choices are drastically different from neighbouring
| France and Netherlands.
| gield wrote:
| For people with their iDevice set to the Swiss/Austrian
| German or Belgian Dutch locales, Apple Translate initially
| didn't even offer their languages in Apple Translate (i.e.
| not even German or Dutch). Only after internal complaining
| did they allow Swiss/Austrian German users to use German in
| Apple Translate.
| fy20 wrote:
| Italy is the same. Each region has it's own variations of
| words, which can be very different or mean different things in
| other regions.
|
| For example in Rome a grocery store bag is "busta", but in
| Milan it is "sachetto" with "busta" being the word they use for
| an envelope.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| The Spain map is not showing Spanish only, those are separate
| languages spoken in Spain
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| There are examples from five language families shown here: Indo-
| European, Basque, Uralic, Turkic, and Afro-Asiatic.
|
| The words for bridge split neatly into language subfamilies. The
| only exception appears to be Welsh.
| riffraff wrote:
| Ugro-finnic too.
| alberto_ol wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages
| dvh wrote:
| You are coloring it by 4 colors like map but you should color
| countries phonetically (speex, levenshtein or something similar)
| overflowcat wrote:
| Wiktionary has dialect maps for common Chinese vocabulary that
| showcases the differences in terminology across various regions
| of Chinese, rather than their similarities. Example: sleep ->
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Template:zh-dial-map/%E7%9D%A... ,
| hide-and-seek -> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Template:zh-dial-
| map/%E6%8D%8...
|
| p.s. I'm saying this because most of these terms that has a dial-
| map are common in daily conversation. The differences in written
| Chinese vocabulary aren't as significant; how scientific and
| technical terms are expressed is largely determined by your
| administrative region.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| Note that a very significant amount of this data on Wiktionary
| comes from the tireless work of a handful of contributors, and
| especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Justinrleung
| consumer451 wrote:
| Huh, the example "she runs" is not correct in Polish. Currently
| translates to "ona dziala" = "she functions."
|
| She runs, as in the form of locomotion, is "ona biega/biegnie."
| lucb1e wrote:
| The site says that in a blue bubble below the input field (I
| agree it's not very noticeable at all):
|
| > This example demonstrates that the map should be interpreted
| with care; some translations have the meaning "she lasts" or
| "it works".
|
| Another mistake for this example, although subtler, is the
| Dutch version, which is translated to the meaning of "she
| walks"
| consumer451 wrote:
| Thanks, didn't notice that. Not very thorough of me.
|
| It's interesting that the site says it uses Google Translate,
| because using it via the web UI, it does give the correct
| answer.
|
| https://translate.google.com/?sl=iw&tl=pl&text=she%20runs&op.
| ..
| Muskwalker wrote:
| The site also says (at the bottom) that it grabbed the
| translations from Google Translate back in 2014 and hasn't
| updated them since.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Perhaps of interest, the translation guesses things like age
| relations and genders. This is accurate when the word has that
| same meaning in English, like nun and monk have a gender, but
| e.g. the word hairdresser in English is translated to a specific
| gender in German and Dutch even though the original didn't have
| one. Similarly for diminutives: "brother" (broer) usually means
| "big brother" in Dutch because for a younger brother you'd add a
| diminutive suffix. It's hard to define, but maybe: words that are
| _not_ synonyms, yet all translate back to your input. (The
| reverse also exists, of course: insulation and isolation isn 't
| differentiated in Dutch)
|
| The map would be more complete with this information because it
| may be very similar or completely different and can be
| interesting to compare, for example:
|
| - EN: _receptionist_ for both, NL: _receptionist_ and
| _receptioniste_ , DE: _rezeptionist_ and _empfangsdame_. The map
| currently just shows the female version for German, without
| indication that they also use a transliteration of the English.
|
| - EN: _little brother_ , NL: _broertje_ (the submission shows a
| doubled up version of _kleine broertje_ ), DE: _kleiner Bruder_.
| Although German has the diminutive suffix to make Bruderchen,
| they don 't use it the way that we do, which I find interesting
| to see.
|
| Google Translate's API can output multiple options, <https://clou
| d.google.com/translate/docs/reference/rest/v3bet...>, and
| Google's own website seems to indeed provide these different
| variants, but there is no label to say what the different array
| entries mean the way that Google's own website shows
|
| I got curious which gender it guesses that you might mean. It
| seems to assume a male unless it's also very heavily female-
| connotated in English. In Dutch and German, it outputs male for
| _hairdresser_ and _doctor_ , female for _nurse_ and
| _receptionist_ (German translations mean "sick-sister" and
| "reception lady", respectively), and mixed for secretary (female
| in Dutch, male in German) because Dutch doesn't have a male word
| for it anymore (only workarounds)
| benregenspan wrote:
| This is very cool. Also, it seems like Romanian is the only
| language where the word for turtle translates literally to
| "shelled frog".
| cantaloupe wrote:
| German's Schildkrote, "shield-toad", is quite similar.
| neontomo wrote:
| Skoldpadda - Swedish too
| joshdavham wrote:
| I love when languages have funny words like that.
|
| Like how in Japanese, "mushroom" can roughly be translates as
| "tree child".
| nakedneuron wrote:
| Hedgehog is literally "needle-mouse" (hari-nezumi).
| dreijs wrote:
| In Dutch, a porcupine is called a "spike-pig"
| (stekelvarken)
|
| Edit: and a turtle is also a "shield-toad" (schildpad)
| riffraff wrote:
| Porcupine is actually the same meaning, porcus (pork)
| spina (thorn/spike). It's just a bit obfuscated in modern
| English compared to e.g. Italian (porcospino)
| shantara wrote:
| Similarly, in many Slavic languages the bat could be translated
| as "flying mouse".
| weddpros wrote:
| French is the only language where Company and Society are the
| same word: societe. It's fun to watch
| psychoslave wrote:
| No, in French you can use both "une compagnie" or "une
| societe", as well as "une entreprise", "une firm", "une
| corporation" and "un business" or even "le biz" are all pretty
| common.
|
| But of course, none of them are fully interchangeable in all
| contexts. You will typically not expect to hear "salut la
| compagnie" in a formal meeting with "les gens de la bonne
| societe."
|
| If you like synonyms, CRISPO gives 77 for societe and 33 for
| compagnie.
|
| https://crisco4.unicaen.fr/des/synonymes/soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9
|
| https://crisco4.unicaen.fr/des/synonymes/compagnie
| joshdavham wrote:
| I highly recommend people go and translate "pineapple".
| kgeist wrote:
| For Portuguese, it gives the Brazilian variant, although the
| translation is placed over Portugal.
| wozniacki wrote:
| Such a neat little tool! I shall use it and share it. Clever idea
| using the map to simultaneously display words. Small feature but
| hugely piques the interest of the user.
| usr1106 wrote:
| The Finnish example translation is wrong: "an example" should be
| "esimerkki". (There are no articles in Finnish.) The map shows
| "esimerkiksi" which means "for example". (Prepositions are
| relatively rare in Finnish.)
|
| Edit: Ah, it says the data is from Google translator. So no
| suprise here, Google translator produces poor results. It's said
| that Deepl is much better. I can't really tell because I don't
| need machine translation Finnish English. Both are roughly
| equally strong foreign languages for me.
| kgeist wrote:
| For Slavic languages, it sometimes produces arbitrary case
| forms, too.
| hulium wrote:
| The fine-print at the bottom of the page says "The translations
| were retrieved around 2014". Machine translation has come a
| long way since then.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Machine translation has come a long way since then, but
| Google Translate continues to be so far behind it's quite
| ridiculous.
| encom wrote:
| I've had very mixed luck with all online translation
| services when translating between danish and english.
| Google was bad to the point of being unusable, but none
| were great. ChatGPT however is excellent at this. It's a
| shame its output is so extremely slow, or it would have
| been perfect.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| DeepL is leagues better than Google Translate, and I can tell
| because I've worked with a lot of translation to and from
| Finnish. They are not even comparable. Google Translate will
| completely garble any translation to or from Finnish. Kagi
| Translate also does a great job in Finnish translation.
| riffraff wrote:
| The Hungarian translation of "en example" is incorrect, the
| translation there would be "as an example" or "for example".
|
| "Egy pelda" would be more literal.
| irrational wrote:
| It seems like it would be more useful if the Russian and Greek
| words were transliterated into the Latin alphabet.
| tdiff wrote:
| It mixes different word meanings on the same screen:
|
| Input: cross
|
| Russian: peresekat' (as in verb "to cross")
|
| Polish: Krzyz (noun, as a christian symbol).
| unwind wrote:
| The notes clearly say that it only shows one meaning, and I it
| would be more difficult (five years ago before LLMs I would
| have just said impossible) to discern between different
| meanings of a word and pick the proper one.
|
| Edit: "translation" -> "meaning".
| tdiff wrote:
| Its great they acknowledge this in their notes, but it does
| not make the service more useful/reliable or accurate.
|
| At least they could have tried picking translations for
| matching parts of speech (nouns, verbs etc), and it would
| have been a great improvement, even if they ignored homonyms.
| Doing so does not require LLM.
| sschueller wrote:
| Here is an interactive card of how Swiss people (Only the German
| speaking part) call the left over piece of an Apple:
| https://www.kleinersprachatlas.ch/interaktive_karten/F15_Apf...
|
| Here some other words as well:
| https://www.kleinersprachatlas.ch/karte-1-butter
| jhoechtl wrote:
| In lower Austria we would call this a "Burzen" -> Apfelburzen.
| But this is colloquial and somewhat outdated.
|
| It's from https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Apfelbutzen
| alberto_ol wrote:
| There is something wrong or that I don't understand. I put "the
| example", the Italian translatione is "nell'esempio" which is
| wrong, but in google translate the translation is correct
| "l'esempio"
| psychoslave wrote:
| Excellent, nice work.
|
| Here are a few feedback for improvement,
|
| - looking up for "user" gives some results, but starting from a
| term in other languages doesn't work; also it doesn't display
| multiple nouns that can apply as a translation (ex:
| ulisatrice/utilisateur in French)
|
| - if the target user is English speaking user centered (at least
| for now), probably providing transliterations (along there
| Cyrillic/Greek correspondence) would probably make more sense
| layer8 wrote:
| One-to-one word translation doesn't make too much sense, because
| words tend to have more than one meaning, and they don't map 1:1
| between languages, both in meaning and usage. For example, "nice"
| is translated here into words that would (depending on language
| and context) more commonly translate back to "beautiful",
| "pleasant", "good", or "fun". They aren't necessarily wrong as
| translations, but the website's premise of "word A in language X
| is equivalent to word B in language Y" is.
| imhoguy wrote:
| You can put phrase, e.g. https://ukdataexplorer.com/european-
| translator/?word=glass+o...
| vincnetas wrote:
| Missed opportunity to colour countries by the similarity
| (phonetical) of the translations. Now as i understand all country
| colours are hardcoded.
| oboes wrote:
| I tried with month names and it doesn't work, it only show the
| English word. Too bad because month names in other languages are
| sometimes interesting.
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| It appears to be using a downloaded/pre-cached sub-set of words
| from Google Translate rather than a live Google Translate
| query.
|
| I assume it doesn't include any proper nouns. I tried putting
| in country names because I always find it interesting what
| different countries are called in different places, but it
| didn't return those either.
| tgv wrote:
| So I tried "folk", and it comes up with the translation for
| "people" in Dutch and German, "folkoric" in French, "popular" in
| Italian, "folk music" in Danish, and fails for a whole bunch of
| languages. And it's these kind of words for which its use is most
| interesting. Words like "linguistics" have a much greater
| similarity across languages than common, old words (although
| surprisingly called glossologia in Greek).
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| i wonder how long until google translate just swaps out for
| gemini
|
| LLMs are so much better at this
|
| (chatgpt 4o gave these answers:
|
| English: folk
|
| French: peuple
|
| German: Volk
|
| Dutch: volk
|
| Italian: popolo
|
| Danish: folk
|
| )
| darkwater wrote:
| > LLMs are so much better at this
|
| Yeah, IME as well LLMs really shine at translation of
| sentences and getting the right meaning depending on the
| context for words. Way, way better than Google Translate via
| web UI or app.
|
| I guess that right now there might be some high level
| IC/manager trying to get a promotion by switching Google
| Translate to use Gemini in a cheap and effective way :)
| hnbad wrote:
| Neither of them is right or wrong, really. "Volk" can have
| very specific connotations in German (e.g. "volkisch"
| nationalism is similar to ethno-nationalism but the concepts
| of "Volk" and ethnic group are not entirely identical which
| is why a separate term exists for the concept and why the
| English term uses it as a loanword). "Folk" can mean many
| different things in English. There is no exact overlap
| between words across languages most of the time so it depends
| on the context. For example, while "Leute" in German also
| translates to "people", in "power from the people" that word
| would be correctly translated as "Volk" not "Leute" as it
| refers to the people as an abstract political force from
| which a state's power is derived.
| adrian_b wrote:
| This is not surprising, because many English words are
| ambiguous, being used not only as nouns, but also as adjectives
| or even as verbs.
|
| All such uses must be translated into different words in other
| languages. When the word to be translated has no context, a
| random translation choice is possible.
|
| "Folk" as in "folk music" or "folk dances" may be translated
| correctly as "folkloric" or "popular".
| tgv wrote:
| I know, but it's a pity. There isn't a natural language
| without ambiguous words. It would be more valuable if e.g. it
| would list all translations.
| zkid18 wrote:
| my favorite example of trade routes influenced the spread of a
| word is "tea". the word for "tea" comes from either a variation
| of "cha" or a variation of "te," reflecting distinct dialect
| pronunciations in China.
|
| countries receiving tea overland (e.g., via the Silk Road)
| adopted forms of "cha," while those trading by sea through Fujian
| ports adopted forms of "te."
|
| The project visualise perfectly this distinction.
| darkwater wrote:
| Not doubting about this but then, how come that Portuguese uses
| the "chai" version, being on the extreme west of Europe, and
| with all the other countries in between Portugal and the end of
| the Silk Road using "te"? Not to mention the fact that
| Portuguese were a naval power for many years, with colonies in
| Asia as well.
| zkid18 wrote:
| Good question, Portuguese traded not through Fujian but
| Macao, where cha is used.
|
| The term cha (Cha ) is "Sinitic," meaning it is common to
| many varieties of Chinese dialects. Meanwhile, the word tea
| comes from the Min Nan variety of Chinese, spoken in the
| coastal Fujian province, where the character Cha is
| pronounced te.
| adamsocrat wrote:
| Didn't know Welsh is bit challenging. e.g. awareness in Welsh is
| "ymwybyddiaeth", I'm sorry what?
|
| Other than that, great implementation.
| brettermeier wrote:
| Search for Welsh road signs, on most you have Welsh and
| English, and the differences are night and day, I find it quite
| amusing => "Drive safely / Gyrrwch yn ddiogel".
|
| Or this village name:
| "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch",
| in it's short form just a smooth "Llanfairpwllgwyngyll"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll).
| alkonaut wrote:
| Why translate 1-2 words? That makes no sense. Words don't map 1-1
| or 1-2 or 2-1. It would make sense to enter a sentence, select
| 1-3 words as important, then highlight the same 1-3 words in the
| translated sentence. But translating the english words "current",
| "right", "bark", "date", etc. are good examples of why 1-1 word
| translations don't make sense.
| alentred wrote:
| Nice idea, quite a novel to represent a dictionary.
|
| Somehow it breaks on words "Monday", "January" and "Italy", for
| example - doesn't show any of the translations.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| The random words had "lead", I tried it and some translations are
| e.g. "plumb" which is about the chemical element, while others
| are e.g. "conduire" which is about the verb "to lead"
|
| So it seems to not interpret the English word as the same one for
| all languages in case of words with different meanings!
| HNDen21 wrote:
| She runs is translated as she walks in several
| languages....should be ona trci in Croatian and ze rent in Dutch
| (German is also translated as she walks)
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| I was excited to try this, but it seems to have a very tiny
| dictionary built in. It came up with nothing for any combination
| of "small {noun}", or some other common words. I sometimes
| struggled to find two words that would work.
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| What is the most "diverse" word? Fewest seemingly etymologically
| related translations?
|
| "girl" is my best so far
| asveikau wrote:
| Off topic, but I recently learned that "girl" in Middle or Old
| English originally referred to a child of either gender, and I
| believe only acquired its gender specific meaning in the late
| middle English or early modern period.
| yitchelle wrote:
| I typed in "nazi". Only UK has the word appear over it.
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