Well, the more general problem about asking people visiting Google Translate to verify if a translation from A->B is correct is that generally people visiting Google Translate didn't know how to translate A->B or weren't very sure.
How many people on Google Translate actually are able to reasonably verify translations? Relatively few - and those qualified few who might poke at Translate out of curiosity are just as likely not to feel inclined to offer free labour to Google.
> Considering Translate is such an important product, I can't fathom why they just don't hire a single linguist (or just anyone who isn't completely clueless, really) per language to register decent translations, or at least import them from a real dictionary...
Perhaps professional translators rather than linguists. I imagine they have some linguists on the project, but they're likely to be more NLP-type linguists.
The difficulty is that they're interested not just in word-level meaning/translation-accuracy, but also phrase- and clause-level accuracy, and those are really large (i.e. theoretically infinite) spaces.
I've heard that the Spanish<->English translations aren't too bad.
How many people on Google Translate actually are able to reasonably verify translations? Relatively few - and those qualified few who might poke at Translate out of curiosity are just as likely not to feel inclined to offer free labour to Google.
> Considering Translate is such an important product, I can't fathom why they just don't hire a single linguist (or just anyone who isn't completely clueless, really) per language to register decent translations, or at least import them from a real dictionary...
Perhaps professional translators rather than linguists. I imagine they have some linguists on the project, but they're likely to be more NLP-type linguists.
The difficulty is that they're interested not just in word-level meaning/translation-accuracy, but also phrase- and clause-level accuracy, and those are really large (i.e. theoretically infinite) spaces.
I've heard that the Spanish<->English translations aren't too bad.