The company Preply, which specializes in online language courses, has now taken a close look at this. For the study, literary texts, business websites and colloquial expressions were translated from English into German, Italian and Spanish and vice versa. The authors of the study then compared the results with the knowledge of bilingual language experts.
In principle, Google’s translation program is getting better and better, also thanks to the constant improvement in artificial intelligence. The more complex the language is and the more colloquial language is used, the more frequently the use of Google Translate can lead to massive misunderstandings. Idioms can also cause problems for the software: If, for example, “neck and leg fracture” appears in a sentence, almost three errors occurred in ten analyzed words.
Italian most difficult
Google Translate performs best when it comes to translating literary originals. In this category, there are 0.36 errors per ten words. It’s 0.56 errors for business sites and 2.77 for slang.
When it comes to languages, Italian and German are the biggest challenges for the software. On average, there are 0.59 errors per 10 words translated into Italian and a low readability rating of 4.5 out of 10, which is attributed to poor sentence structure.
In German, the average number of errors is 0.54, and the readability score is 6.8 out of 10.
Languages like Spanish or English, on the other hand, are comparatively easy to translate for Google Translate. This is because the algorithm has more access to English and Spanish documents from the Internet and thus learns more quickly. Along with Chinese and Hindi, English and Spanish are among the most widely spoken languages in the world.
Source: Nachrichten
