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Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI
(futurism.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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I just said to someone yesterday on Mastodon that it seems as though they're not using humans any more, because WTF is this shit?
Yeah, this is frustrating.
I can handle absurd sentences like "The dog is cooking the dinner", and actually finds them beneficial because it prevents me from guessing the whole sentence.
But this is a sign that not enough human efforts are poured into create permutation of the answers.
Let me guess, the full sentence was: "Last night we ate the dog cooked for dinner"... /s
nope, "The dog is cooking a dinner" is that kind of absurdist sentence that works. So that I just don't guess a human on the subject position. Or 'eating' for the verb
I actually see a learning purpose in those ridicilous sentences.
I'll far more likely remember the cat that works at the small hospital than if Juan does it.
This is frustrating, but it has always been an issue; and usually the more you advance in a language tree the more it happens, because fewer people have found the problem and reported it. It's a human problem that comes with not considering every possibility when creating an exercise. I'd imagine that using AI (in addition to humans) would actually help reduce cases like this, since they could be detected before users run into them.
Interesting, I usually question my English skills if something like this happens!
It's because a good translation is not (always) literal.
In the German version it says taglich in hamburg. In English you would indeed put an adverb (like daily) at the end. It works the other way around but it's not really what a native English speaker would say.
Not true at all. OP’s construction is perfectly valid english.
Absolutely this. I'd have argued that 'every day' is a more idiomatic translation than 'daily', and what native speakers would say, but that's irrelevant. English tends to emphasise the end of sentences as the most important part, so all these translations are correct depending on the nuance that you intend:
Wouldn't question any of those constructions as a native speaker. In fact, original responders' example was why I gave up on Duolingo myself originally, some years ago. Translating 'future tense' sentences from Spanish into English or back again is always going to be a matter of opinion, since English doesn't have the verb conjugations that Spanish does. Guessing the 'sanctified answer' is tedious, when a lot of the time it's not even the most natural form of a sentence.
Isn’t English able to disambiguate by using helper words like “will” or “would”?
What tenses can’t be translated completely?
That's almost exactly the problem. English uses helper words exclusively for future tense, and indeed, helper words like 'to' to form an infinitive. 'Will' is the helper word to show that something is a fact, that it is definite - grammatically, it is indicative. (The sun will rise tomorrow.) 'Would' is the helper word to show that something is an opinion, or dependent on something else - grammatically, it is subjunctive. (If you push that, it would fall; if it was cheaper, I would buy it.)
Spanish has both helper words for future tense (conjugations of 'ir', analogous to 'going to', often used in speech) and straight-up conjugations for future tense (doesn't exist in English; often used in writing). It also conjugates verbs differently if they're indicative, subjunctive, or imperative (asking or telling someone to do something). This is how Spanish manages to have fifty-odd ways to conjugate every verb, which is very confusing to English speakers who make do with three ways and helper words.
Translating a 'future tense sentence' for Duolingo requires you to have psychic powers about whether something is fact or opinion, which helper words are wanted, and so on, and it usually comes down to guessing between multiple 'correct' answers, which Duo will reject all but one of.