Google Translate Annoyances

In this day and age of almost daily major advances in computational linguistics and the reputation of Google and its affiliates a wizards of AI & machine learning it is almost astonishing how poorly their smartphone application does.

I have a strong need for English to Chinese and vice versa translations. Thus my list of annoyances covers only these two language pairs and it covers only voice input.

Annoyances:

1. English sentences longer than about 5-6 words will be truncated or it runs into trouble with transcribing it into proper English text.
2. Frequently, I have to repeat English sentences, because it misinterprets my words although it is my smartphone for over a year (Samsung S10)
3. Chinese voice input by a native Chinese speaker from central China does not fare any better on my smartphone. He sometimes has to repeat speaking the Chinese sentences for half a dozen times until he gives up.

The Current Version Of The Google Translate App Sucks

Posted: 8/22/2016

I have been using the Google Translate app for years now (as a bilingual person with some additional language skills in at least one other language, I frequently look up things in those languages), but for the past several months I noticed that the latest version is quite inferior to older ones.

In particular, you are offered only one word as translation, while it used to be several in the past. The translation rating feature was eliminated. Google has dumbed down this app to a point where it becomes useless.

Recently, I looked up the French word gais (the context was a prominent classical music piece with a French title, which I do not recall anymore), well Google Translate returned homosexual. How stupid is that?