Can anyone translate this please?

In My Humble Opinion
21

For what it’s worth, ChatGPT is great at translations (best I’ve seen yet), but for popular prints or any sort of common image, sometimes the old school image lookups work better.

If they can find an exact or similar match by perceptual hash (“image looks similar to this other one”) instead of using AI to directly translate the text, often times you’ll find some blog post or Wikipedia article explaining the whole context instead of just providing the literal translation.

I think Bing image search is still that way. Not sure about Google Lens. These days AI is sneaking into every product…

22

I was working in the translation industry in the early 90s and machine translation, as it was called then, was a joke. It’s really gotten so much better now.

23

Nevermind translations, it speaks and writes English better than most native speakers I know :slight_smile:

24

Here in Japan and Taiwan, LINE is the standard messaging platform. You can have a machine translation added to chats, and the translation is horrible. I’m in a couple of group chats and it’s crazy how bad some of the translations are. ChatGPT is in an entirely different class.

25

I was using Google translate plus camera to translate, and it was obviously using AI. For example, the words outside the box it variously translated as “at least one cent” and “it is better to make a profit”. Not saying either of those is correct, but it was obviously doing more than just matching characters. Google Lens probably does similar.

26

I tried google translate with camera and it thought the characters were 最好鳥一毛, best bird. However, it has to be remembered that native Japanese couldn’t read the name, either.

27

Translate what, though?

I suppose it sort of looks like Hokusai’s signature:

28

We’re talking about the name outside the box.

Google translate is usually really good at identifying kanji, including those for names, although given names are more difficult than family names because people create readings for the charactors.

I often use google translate to remind me of the reading of kanji even when I don’t need a translation.

29

At one point Deepl was considered better than google translate for Japanese. I remember a Japanese friend of mine who commented as much. I do not know if he still thinks so since his team is working on projects using ChatGPT.

Here is a comparison from last year about the relative strengths of AI translation from Japanese to English from the Japan Times: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2023/07/18/language/chatgpt-bing-bard-and-deepl-which-one-offers-the-best-japanese-to-english-translation/

It is from the last year and things may have been improved but still it is an interesting test on the subject.

//i\\

30

I typed “葛飾 北斎” into DeepL translate, and it immediately printed out “Katsushika Hokusai”. Granted, this guy had a lot of names and signatures:
https://www.hokusai-katsushika.org/names-amp-signatures.html

31

BTW the page I linked to above has the signature

labelled “Zen Saki No Hokusai Aratame Hitsu (1820-1834)”

32

Google does perfectly well when the kanji are input rather scanned.