Where the Chinese is a word with multiple meanings (and the less common meaning is used) “欢迎各国朋友来华参加” (preceded by a discussion of expos) = “friends from around the world are welcome to participate in the expo,” rather than “welcome friends from all countries to participate in China”.Where the Chinese omits previously-mentioned information Four Common Machine Mistakesīelow are four types of mistakes machines commonly made when translating excerpts of the Xi speech: Where the Chinese is an extremely long sentence Simultaneous interpretation has the added problem of audio transcription – the noise of the room and the speaker’s dialect make things difficult for even the most experienced human interpreters. Fiction or colloquial conversations would be a stretch. Had the audio been faithfully transcribed, the “AI solution” might have provided a satisfactory English translation.įor now, machines can only be trusted for Chinese-English translations of technical manuals, official speeches and announcements, and serious news articles. Given Tencent’s decent translation product though, I suspect it was the Chinese-speech-to-text that went awry. Thus, it is possible that DeepL may do an even better job with Xi’s speech.ĭuring the Bo’ao Forum, Tencent launched a massive PR campaign to promote its “AI solution to conference interpretation.” As seen below, the machine turned out to be more of a publicity stunt. As shown above, an English speaker would not have trouble following Xi’s speech in real time if he relied on only Google, Microsoft Neural, Sogou, or Tencent.Īnother translation product DeepL, which has, in my opinion, outperformed Google in Spanish-English translations, has not made its Chinese-English service available yet. Now it captures most, if not all of the main idea. Only a few years ago was Google Translate struggling to come up with coherent sentences. Errors are marked in red and awkward phrasing in green. Part 1 of the test results is shown below. Second tier: NetEase Youdao, Baidu (in no particular order).First tier: Google, Microsoft Neural 1, Sogou, Tencent (in no particular order).To ensure the fairness of our test, I ran the Bo’ao speech on the various translation sites before the official translation came out in late April. Hence, Google must have used the official translation as training material. But after feeding it to Google Translate, I got results that are identical to the official translation provided by the Chinese government. Furthermore, the Chinese government has provided an official translation of Xi’s speech, so we will have a benchmark to compare the machines against.īefore I reveal the test results, I should note that I had originally planned on using a Xi speech from 2017. I chose this speech because if machine translation is to make any headway, it would start from the most formal (and, dare I say, most formulaic) official speeches. I was pleasantly surprised by the machine translation’s quality and thus would like to find out which company offers the best product.įor our (very unscientific) blind test, we will be using excerpts of President Xi Jinping’s speech at the 2018 Bo’ao Forum. I reluctantly started using machine translation last year, after the amount of material to translate became overwhelming. Who Offers the Best Chinese-English Machine Translation? A Comparison of Google, Microsoft Bing, Baidu, Tencent, Sogou, and NetEase YoudaoĪt work, I frequently share Chinese-language articles with English-speaking colleagues and English articles with Chinese-speaking colleagues. Who Offers the Best Chinese-English Machine Translation? A Comparison of Google, Microsoft Bing, Baidu, Tencent, Sogou, and NetEase Youdao
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