Is it just me or is the translation of Persian very very bad?
I imported lessons from a textbook. One sentence/title was “house cleaning”
The word for word translation was okay, but the full sentence was translated as “I am moving house” (which was incorrect).
Another time I got weird translations for single words as well. Thinking about dropping persian on lingq and using a dictionary instead. I read that the ministories have those problems too… How does the quality of languages differ so much? What can I do to improve it, especially when the text is unknown.?
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Are you referring to suggested user hints?
Both the dictionary (suggested word translation) and the sentence mode translation. Sometimes the first one sometimes (more often) the second one. Both have huge mistakes unlike in other languages, as far as I noticed
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Thanks, we’ll look into that.
I haven’t found it particularly bad in my learning. Have you tried changing the translation source? (If I remember right, you can switch betweem Google Translate, DeepL, and ChatGPT…) Google Translate does often have trouble accurately translating Persian expressions, though. I’ve found the Glosbe dictionary with its corpus-based context lookup really helpful.
Edit: I just double checked. Under Settings/App Settings/Reader/ Sentence Translations/Default Translation Resource I see that I have ChatGPT, which has seemed the most reliable option to me with Persian so far.
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Thanks unfortunately, I can’t find the setting that you are describing. I can’t choose a default translation resource neither in the app nor in the browser. When I enter the path I get a blank page.
Edit: found it and it is set to chatgpt but the translation is just wrong. (Which I only know bc I am working with texts from a textbook. If it were unknown to me I would have trouble getting the meaning right)
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Now I’m curious 
Would you still have the original text and translation along with the wrong one from ChatGPT to hand?
(Of course, wrong translations are to be expected with any mind of machine translation, AI or otherwise. It’s obviously undesirable, though.)
The headline of the text was house cleaning. Cleaning was introduced in the lesson and the text was about cleaning windows rugs etc before a festival.
Chatgpt gave “I’m moving house” so completely off!
Well I think it is a scary trend especially for rare languages given the fact that most people rely heavy on them and don’t even question the results. Also it doesn’t help learners bc misunderstandings will pop up: huge difference between cleaning a flat or moving)
Hm. I have to say, I feel like that’s getting it backwards. The trend is going the other way!
With a language that’s under-studied, the default will always be not understanding, and misunderstanding it. That’s just the background situation.
I started learning Persian on LingQ a bit less than three years ago, and since then there have been MASSIVE technological improvements. When I started, the text-to-speech was horrible, literally a monotonous robot. I was also able to work with support on here to get compound words to work as they should, an issue that’s now solved as far as I can see.
And then came LingQ’s integration of AI translation, which has been another huge boost. It’s vastly better than Google Translate at recognizing Persian expressions, and it made a real, appreciable difference in my understanding of more difficult texts.
The fact that there are things it still gets wrong is irritating, but that’s just because we’re building up something that wasn’t there before. The trend is definitely in the right direction, and I’ve been impressed with how fast it has been.
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I also use ChatGPT as the Default translator, and I find ChatGPT to be very accurate. I live with a native speaker, and what I do is write down sentences I want to learn, ask ChatGPT to translate them, and then import them. My partner has verified multiple times that Chat GPT is about 90% accurate.
Im sorry but I beg to differ. I don’t share your experience. I use chatgpt for planning my study sessions and is it great fot that . However, I used it in the past for grammar Russian and it made mistakes that I noticed (my level is B1). Luckily I have a native friend and they confirmed that most of it was incorrect.
I summarized a video in Russian for chatgpt and it said I nailed it. I gave the same video to my friend and it turned out that I got everything wrong!
I somrtimes use chat gpt to talk about a TV show I watch in a foreign language and it tells me things that are wrong all the time. Now I prefer to watch the original and confirm what has been said instead if I cant remember.
My russian friend made the same experience with languages math and other topics.
I also let chatgpt (re)write texts into chinese for my chinese study group. The texts are inintelligible (often ) and have major mistakes (always)
And then moving house and cleaning a flat are not the same thing in my Persian text…
So none of the languages I tried was even remotely correct. Now I try to get bilingual texts ( if I don’t know the story well) and a decent dictionary from the library. We rely too heavily on technology. We don’t even notice when it fails us! I go back to the roots bc a dictionary and some novels was all I had when I studied Spanish at University…
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Ah interesting that you have had a different experience! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. All the best with your studies.
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