Practicing Sentence Writing in a Foreign Language - Google Translate or ChatGPT/Copilot?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been learning Bahasa Indonesia on Duolinguo for the past two months, and I’m really enjoying it.

Very soon after I started, I felt the need to practice sentences other than the ones used by the app, partly because it’s intellectually stimulating, partly because the Duolingo examples get repetitive very quickly, and are occasionally weird (I don’t need to know how to say “This banana is sleeping” and “That apple can see you”)

At the moment I’m trying to build subordinate clauses with various connectives (but, when, so, because, etc.) and I use Google translate to check whether my version makes sense, i.e. I write the sentence in Bahasa Indonesia, and check the translation both in English and French. However, I’ve noticed that when I do a reverse-translation, the results are different from what I initially wrote, sometimes significantly so, and I’m starting to doubt Google Translate’s accuracy.

As a result I did the same with Copilot yesterday, and not only did I get translations that looked more reliable, but also came with explanations if I asked. Just for fun, I upped the ante by asking it to translate my Bahasa Indonesia sentences into 4 languages (English, French, Javanese and Malagasy) and got results within a few seconds which were accurate for the first two, and looked correct based on the little I know of the latter.

Am I right in thinking that using ChatGPT or Copilot will give me more reliable results? If that’s the case, I’ll drop Google Translate and switch to them.

And in case you ask, of course I don’t know anyone who speaks Bahasa Indonesia at the moment.

2

ChatGPT and similar are good at being confidently incorrect, they’ll swear up and down that they have the right answer. Google Translate just provides information without commentary. I don’t think there’s a way to say one or the other is “better” without some extensive testing.

Translations are better for common languages or easy/grammatical ones. Indonesia is one of the most populous countries, but doesn’t have a huge lingua franca so it’s not “common” per se in this context, but is pretty easy to translate, so it’s probably better than many other translations.

Here I think @CairoCarol lived in Indonesia, so probably speaks it.

3

My Indonesian is better than that of most of the foreigners I dealt with while living in Indonesia for 17 years - but that’s a pretty low bar. My reading, writing, and grammar understanding are much better than my ability to hold a sophisticated conversation - despite the fact that I have exceptional mimetic ability (I’ve been told this by many language instructors across several languages, so I guess it must be true), my aural comprehension really lags. Go figure!

Anyway, to the topic of the thread - actually, Bahasa Indonesia is a lingua franca, and since it is the shared language of the fourth most populous country in the world, I guess (depending on what you meant by your statement) it is indeed a “huge lingua franca.”

I’ve never dealt with any intersection between CoPilot /ChatGPT and Indonesian, and probably won’t. But I consult GT fairly often, though not to do translation for me. When I forget an Indonesian word I want, I type it in English and look at all the choices GT provides (there are usually several below the box) and with my memory thus prompted, I choose the one that was on the tip of my tongue, or a better one I was just reminded of.

I also run the Indonesian emails I write through GT before sending, to see if GT thinks my meaning is what it I intended it to be. It’s gratifying, because I’m sure my Indonesian is less than perfect, but GT produces flawless English equivalents, leading me to hope I sound equally grammatical in Indonesian (I bet I don’t!).

4

If the language has a large footprint on the Internet, then I’d go with ChatGPT over Google Translate. Keep in mind that Large Language Models are only as good as the material that they were trained on.

With that said (bear with me here), the other day typed in a few paragraphs about a Gettier Counterexample (a philosophy thing) I had managed to create in the wild at work–I made a “right for the wrong reasons” statement that was totally based on sound logic, so I believed it, it was justifiable, and it was true.
ChatGPT went on to analyze my paragraph and explain the nuances of Gettier Counterexamples and how I had not exactly created one, but had come close.

This seemed to be something worthy of testing language translation.
I said “Say, can you retell my little story in informal Brazilian Portuguese?”

It translated the whole thing in a way that really looked like a conversation between old friends at work.

Then I said “Agora, fala como se fosse professor de português, bem formal.” (“Now speak as if you were a Portuguese teacher, very formal.”)

The whole story was retold in a very different tone, such as one might expect a VP to use while addressing a town hall meeting at work.

They both passed the smell test for me, but I needed the extra confirmation: I had my Brazilian wife read both. She was impressed, especially with the nuances of the colloquial version.

I don’t think Google Translate will allow you to request different tone like that.

I wouldn’t use it for learning proper usage–the informal one had things like “eu tava numa reunião”, where “tava” really should be “estava”.
The formal one had a different problem: it had constructions like “um colega questionou-me” and “Expliquei-lhe que havia lido” that sound stilted and guys at work just wouldn’t be saying it like that. Key would be knowing what tone you asked for and learning with that expectation.

But in both cases, the non-trivial story was translated accurately.

I then asked it to explain Gettier Counterexamples in Portuguese, in a few simple sentences that a child could understand. And it did!

5

I use both Google translate and ChatGPT for Japanese, and have found ChatGPT to be a little better, but the problem is that neither one is right all of the time, even for simple sentences.

I use ChatGPT in teaching, both to make us sample sentences and translate them. For example, in a lower level class, I was teaching objective pronouns (me, us, etc.) and had the sentence, “He helped me with my homework.” which is mangled, even though it did better with other sentence such as “The teacher gave her a present.”

GT also has strange translations as well, and probably more.

I teach some Taiwanese students online and use both of them to translate when my students don’t understand an English sentence. They are often OK, although both can be really off and the student doesn’t understand.

Have you tried any of the language exchange apps? I use Tandem and have used some sites in the past. The people usually aren’t professional teachers, but they can tell you if something is correct or not.

6

Right. ChatGPT does this well but Google Translate doesn’t. Japanese has formal and informal speech, and ChatGPT can do that reasonably well.

7

I’ve just had a look at Tandem and I like it.

It’s way to early for me to use it now, but I may very well give it a try after I come back from Java and Bali next summer. That trip will be my baptism of fire so to speak, as I’ll try to use as much of the language as I can.

Speaking of which…

That’s what I’m doing at the moment, but with basic phrases.

My goal is to write a (not so) little phrasebook for me to use there. Ultimately, I’d love to write a quintilingual English - French - Indonesian - Javanese - Malagasy phrasebook and I really want to make sure that whatever is in there is correct. Accuracy will not be an issue for the first two, and I hope to speak Indonesian well enough at some point to be able to tell whether what an AI comes up with is legit. For Malagasy, and even more so Javanese, I’ll have to rely mostly on AI.

Well, I noticed this just yesterday.

I asked CoPilot to translate a sentence containing the word “cake”. The English and French sentences were correct, the ones in Indonesian and Malagasy looked pretty much like what I had expected, but I was surprised to see that the Javanese translation had the word roti, which means “bread” in Indonesian. Since the latter has a specific word for “cake” (kue), I asked Copilot whether there wasn’t a specific word for it in Javanese too, and sure enough, it ended up ‘admitting’ that you could use jajanan.

So, not perfect and a bit of digging is needed. Still, for the moment, I’m leaning towards shifting to Copilot/ChatGPT.

8

I always found it much easier to use my Bahasa Indonesia in Bali, because I was mostly interacting with people who spoke Balinese at home, so their Indonesian was slower and more formal, hence easier for me to understand. In Jakarta, there is a very slangy form of Indonesian that’s hard to keep up with (is your language study teaching you words like “nggak”?) and in Central Java, the Indonesian is heavily infused with Javanese words. Sunda wasn’t so bad, but I spent very little time in that part of the island. And of course, taxi drivers are always easy to talk to, because they want to be nice and they are used to simplifying their speech to make it easier for foreigners.

It’ll be interesting to see if you also notice that some places/situations are easier than others. I think my experience was fairly typical, but as I said earlier, the weakest part of language skills is aural comprehension.

9

Thanks!

I’ll be staying in Central Java mostly and not at all in Sunda. I’ll have private drivers/guides, so I’ll try and practice a bit with them, and at the hotels too.

My stay in Java is packed with activities and visits, so I probably won’t have the time to meet people. But I’ll have more free time in Bali, so I guess I’ll have some opportunities to practice my language skills there.

10

I wonder if there’s any place in the equation for an Indonesian teacher of English and/or Indonesian:

FWIW … I spent just over five weeks in Indonesia about 30 years ago and loved every single minute of it. Among the best memories of my life.

Enjoy!

11

Thanks, I’m really looking forward to it!

Honestly, I’ve been thinking about this a bit. I’ve been in touch with an Australian professor who is going to publish a book on the Javanese language and he’s recommended a language school in Yogyakarta to me.

I’m already planning to drop by while I’m there to see whether I can buy some books, and if I love the country as much as I hope, I may sign up for an immersion class in the summer of 2026. Their website says that they offer courses in Indonesian, Javanese, Japanese, German, English and French, and I have experience teaching two of these languages…

Realistically, I do not want to be so far away from my daughters.

12

Pretty much everything is cool about Yogya. *

Aside: If you can, visit Flores, which is my favourite part (of course, I have not been to Kalimantan or Sulawesi, both on my bucket list) but Flores is perfect. Low tourisn, but still infrastructure for it. Glorious ikat cloth. Possible komodos (not as much as Komodo, though).

Great sea, seafood, food in general. One thing that did bug me about Indonesia was that with vast natural resources and huge culture - there are something in the region of 200 or more ethnicities - the food was fairly standard. One area’s Mie Goreng was pretty much any area’s Mie Goreng (a noodle dish with finely chopped meat, of various kinds).

* a common joke/trope, at least amongst Javanese, is that the “hippie” culture is centered in Yogya, and while it is still pretty straight-laced, you do see more men with long hair there than elsewhere on Java

13

ETA: flying into Maumere in Flores is… spectacular. Try book a left window seat. Short final approach is over an active volcano. The view is both spectacular and terrifying.

Note: in my enthusiasm, I did not realise this was FQ, I thought I was answering in IMHO. Apologies for offering opinion rather than facts.