@Cyrillic@lab.nyanide.com @ocean@raru.re
Noticed that too! I'm keeping no cookies — they are getting cleaned up as soon as I close the tab, Google should know nothing about the region. The IP addresses I'm using are detected either as US or as Polish in all the GeoIP databases, and yet Español… where did THAT come from?

@bigmattoidchimpin@annihilation.social @WandererUber@poa.st @ocean@raru.re
Ha-ha-ha-ha! Yeah, that's exactly why I called it machine-assisted translation — it wasn't a translation per se, more like a rough draft to work with. If you were doing translation commercially it could save you some time, but you still had to speak both languages to work with it. Software like that often included tools for proofreading and additional dictionaries you could plug in as it couldn't even detect the context — the field the text is from and you had to give it a few kicks in the back to get better results: that's a medical text, that's an engineering article, etc. Using wrong dictionaries could give you really funny results
The technology later got adopted in a more mainstream way, but the results were… yeah, like that 🤭
When I use Google Translate via SimplyTranslate today I get thrown back to those days: like WTF is this?!!! This word obviously has different meaning in this context! I'm using it to translate posts in foreign languages on Fedi and it's still somewhat usable for that, but in its current form I sure won't be using it to write comments in foreign languages. I'm just not confident about the results AT ALL

@WandererUber@poa.st @ocean@raru.re
Yes, exactly! Even in its inception it was better and same as with search it got worse recently. I used to have a tab with SimplyTranslate open, it was a great tool to access Google Translate — not anymore, with languages I somewhat understand it's barely useful, I might as well use Reverso to translate some words, and with other languages — I'm not even sure the result has anything to do with original text. Even a year ago you could pull an article through it, fix a few sentences here and there and be done with it — it was good enough. Right now I'm giving it a few well-formed sentences in English — not even complex ones where it might get lost, to translate into my native language and… the result is gibberish. It can't handle passive voice at all, it's incorrect tenses, incorrect cases all over the place — this isn't a translation even, this is some word soup! A schoolkid with a dictionary translating word-for-word would do a much better job than this!
The motive? It gives you slightly better results if you use it directly, not via API as SimplyTranslate does — here the motive is obvious, but otherwise… no, same as with search. Do they have ads in Google Translate? I don't know because I have those blocked. Does it give you better results in Google Chrome? I don't know, they might be incentivising me to use it in a way they could serve me more ads or harvest more data. I didn't do a thorough research — just sharing my observation and for me, the way I used to use it, it got noticeably worse.

@ocean@raru.re
I wonder if they utilised the same strategy for Google Translate? Because it's equally unusable now — I recall early machine-assisted translation systems from the nineties doing much better job that what Google Translate does now. At times it's hard to figure out what is the meaning of the resulting text even if you speak both languages and know what the usual pitfalls are.