Translation feature is getting more and more aweful (Chinese)

Here an example:

不要 神话
What is should translate to: “no myth”
What the Lingq included google translate shows: “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”???

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Looks terrible, but I don’t think we can blame Google Translate:

It smells more like DeepL:

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I think that AI was having a meltdown. :rofl:

In any case, this happened to me as well, I guess it was with German. It was something similar with no meaning, something like : “nia nia nia…”

Was there music in the background? I have noticed that when there is music or noise those weird things could increase.

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It is the Lingq-associated translation, and I believe it is google (I might be wrong).

Here is another one:
受到 的 启发
What is should translate to: “achieved enlightenment”
What the Lingq included google translate shows: “Inspired by”

WTF?
Is there a fix?

:face_with_diagonal_mouth:

Thanks. I now begin to understand what Bamboozle meant with Deepl…I thought we could still choose the translation engine we prefer. So, why does it say preferred dictionaries “google, forvo, train chinese” in my case?

When selecting a word or phrase LingQ will punt the text to a translation service, the idea is to always provide a translation, even if no user saved meanings are available. This is the same service that is used when clicking the translate button in sentence mode.
The main problem appears to be that DeepL itself is less robust than Google Translate, you should be able to reproduce the results using the DeepL website. But LingQ does make these failures more likely, for example by adding spaces between characters, which is unusual. Additionally, LingQ doesn’t understand non-western punctuation marks and gets confused when determining line breaks, especially if two or more punctuation marks follow each other. So you might see sentences begin with closing quotation marks. For example importing: 「你好吗?」 will put the “」” on a new line and when DeepL is faced with a “」” at the beginning of a sentence it often freaks out and you can trash the entire translation.
We can only hope that LingQ will allow us to select the desired translation engine in the future.

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Yes, this is something we asked when they switched to DeepL. I was preferring Google Translate as well. They both use different concepts and it’s a matter of preference in the way we study. Unfortunately, it seems it is not possible to have both options at the moment.

However, I thought they switched to DeepL for the sentence by sentence translation. You are talking about the popular meaning - single word translation. I’m not sure about it.

Google translation still exists for some things. For example, when I highlight more than 9 words, and the system doesn’t allow the selection, there is a window that opens with the possibility to ask for the Google Translation to translate.

You can also add Google Translation in your own dictionaries. I have it for all languages.

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We are working on the issue with those quotation marks. They cause problems with DeepL and we are working on a solution. In the meantime, another thing for all of you to try is the new AI translation option that is currently only available in the full Lesson Editor by clicking on the Translations option in the left hand sidebar.
Once you open up this dialog, you can click the Generate Translation button to generate a translation for any missing sentence translations in the lesson using AI. This feature will be added in the Reader as well shortly when clicking on the View Translation option in the menu.
An ability to try both DeepL and Google Translate is also something we are looking at. But, hopefully this helps in the meantime.

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Both Google Translate and DeepL should be available as dictionaries you can add in Resources. The sentence and phrase translations are currently coming from DeepL in most languages. We will look at customizing the default dictionary so that users can switch this themselves if they want.

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