I love English and was once good enough to become an English teacher at a Japanese junior high school. However, that was in the past and since then my knowledge of English has been declining rapidly. So, as part of my language learning, I decided to submit some simple questions and comments about English language that are not easy for me (and that I should ask on HiNative or Quora) to Newgrounds. I am not an expert in English and may be making elementary mistakes, but thank you for your patience.

Is machine translation dangerous? | English Is Not So Easy 2

The performance of machine translation these days is extremely high. To give you an idea of how high it is, I have translated recipes for dishes written in English and actually cooked them. In the 2000s, there were some Japanese translation software, but I remember that they did never output natural Japanese that made sense. Such software are now already extinct, and the following two systems diligent are currently dominating Japan.

Google Translation: He is a "diligent" translator who returns the most accurate word-for-word translation in the world. While there are almost no mistranslations, he is not so good at translating polysemic words or words that he doesn't know and tends to ignore some words or output unnatural sentences.

DeepL: He is a "passionate" translator and very good at expressing natural and "wet" (at least Japanese) sentences, and he outputs translations that did not come to my mind. However, he sometimes outputs a translation that has the exact opposite meaning due to the omission and misinterpretation of original words. The potential for causing mistranslations is higher than with Google Translate. The function for users to customize the translated text implies that this software should be used by people who are already familiar with the language.

I don't believe that the advent of machine translation eliminates the need to learn the language. It is not only because machine translation could cause mistranslations. This is a mistake I actually made:

Friend: "Do you mind using your art?"

Precip.24: "Yes. Of Course!"

This is totally an excuse, but there is no Japanese equivalent to "Do you mind ...-ing?", so no matter how good translation apps you use, they will probably output "...してもいいですか？ (May I ...?)". Of course, I knew this phrase, but at that time, I read only the Japanese translation and replied, "Yes, of course!"

This is when I came to realize that even when using a translator, I should always check the original text. Google Chrome has the ability to translate sites using Google Translate, and I think this is a great technology, but the display format that masks the original text needs improvement.