Mildly Infuriating

They don't. OP just bulk reposts other people's complaints. Talk about mildlyinfuriating

You notice it when you look at international instructions on packets of food. The non-English texts have a distinct English vibe even when the product is, say, French or German.

In my experience, with the amount of mistakes similar to the one in the OP, I strongly suspect that language is somehow unbelievably close (semantically) to English then.

I decided to quickly experiment with two languages I somewhat know, and got 3/3 incorrect translations consistent with English as intermediary:

• Russian ширинка (fly, meaning "zipper on your trousers") -> Georgian ფრენა (to fly, as in "flight") - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary
• Russian парковаться (to park, as in "park your car") -> Georgian პარკი (park, meaning "green space with trees") - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary
• Russia лежать (to lie, as in "lie on your back") -> Georgian ტყუილი (lie, as meaning "untruth") - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary

It makes exactly the same mistakes if you translate from Russian to Spanish and French too.

I don't know if there are many other languages where "zipper on your trousers" and "flight", "park your car" and "green space with trees", "lie on your back" and "untruth" would all be pairwise the exact same word. I strongly suspect not, or at least it would be a language really close to English.

Very old article, they are absolutely just using llms nowdays

Edit: this is the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04558 the article is about

you'd think they would use embeddings nowadays instead, with all the llm hype going on

Doesn't German -> Dutch basically involve just translating half the words to English and adding a silly accent though?

The way translation engines are trained is with a body of written text in two languages, which teaches the engine both how words translate and how they fit in equivalent semantic contexts. That way it can decide which synonym is the best one to use given the context, and lose the least amount of context in the bridging.

Of course a person as put in effort, so has in every language. But that's irrelevant if there isn't a large body of text in both languages to learn from. I'm sure German and Dutch have a looooot of shared texts.

Are they? I know that its been that way years ago, but now with ai technology, it should be able to translate text not just by the word definition, but also context and conceptual meaning. At lest it is supposed to work this way if they used ai for actually useful stuff and not another slop generator.