I used an AI code to translate any chinese subbed video

[isaacdl]

Fang Bo's videos are particularly difficult to work with here. A majority of the problems that have nothing to do with AI arise from typos (speech-to-text?) and missing punctuation (standard practice but usually replaced by a space) in the sub. On top of that, some of them come from OCR errors and issues unique to simplified Chinese.

In 都是红面 that is mistranslated as ""It's all river noodles", the quotation mark could be an OCR error misidentifying the top left part of the character 都 due to interference from the net in the background. The "river" in "river noodles" is an OCR error of the character 红 (red) misidentified as 江 (river). I suspect the OCR wouldn't have made the same mistake with 紅, the traditional counterpart of 红. 面 is a long-standing issue unique to simplified Chinese, which can mean face/side/noodle. In traditional Chinese, noodle is a separate character - 麵.

In 他球才能很稳定的过去不飘 that is translated as "He can pass the ball very stably without drifting", the problem stems from the pronoun 他, which should be treated as 它 instead. There is no article (a, an, the) in the Chinese language, but here 他/它 would serve that role, and 他/它球 would mean "the ball" and the whole sentence would translate to "so that the ball can get across steadily without wobbling". The etymology of 它/他 evolving as the third-person pronoun.

In 就是会長 that is translated as "is the president", 会長 is treated as a noun (can't blame the AI), when it means "it becomes long" in this context and therefore "the shot would land deep".

Thanks for your detailed answer. Even if the typos are outside of my hand, I can still change the word "noodle" or "river" with face and red respectively, so if even it is a OCR error, I can still fix it when this happens. The benefict of being in a very specific context (table tennis), I can assume river or noodle is not gonna appearanytime in my videos, so their meaning has to be what you have specified.

In the second paragraph, can I assume that drifting was a bad translation for woobling?

About the 3rd one, you are seeing that symbol has 2 meanings, one is president and one is deep-long?

Maybe I can set the language to translate to traditional chinese instead of simplified? I'm not at home at the moment but if I'm remember correctly, the label that I used in the google API was cn-CN, so maybe I don't have the option to change between simplified and traditional chinese.
Thanks in advance again, I'm getting more and more interested in learning chinese with your responses.

 

[zeio]

Yes, limiting to/identifying specific keywords is one way to deal with it.

Drifting is actually the word-for-word and more accurate translation from a physics standpoint (see quotes), but wobbling happens to be the more common term in this context, which is commonly used to describe the erratic/zigzag movement of a knuckleball in football/soccer, baseball, cricket and for no-spin balls and longpips shots in table tennis.

For real people watching the video, 就是会長 would never be taken to mean "is the president" because the initial and tone for 長 would be different. 会長 (would be long) is pronounced hui4 chang2 whereas 会長 (president) is pronounced hui4 zhang3, similar to how the accent and meaning of an English word are different for verb and noun. Without context and in writing only, I would've done what the AI did as well.

Translating to Traditional Chinese would be an interesting experiment. Converting from Traditional Chinese to Simplified Chinese is like a lossy compression where some information is lost, vital in some cases, but is largely fine. Converting back is usually problematic and has been alleviated in recent years but is still not satisfactory [1, 2].

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-a-pitcher-throws-a-k/

For a knuckleball, the important thing is that the ball rotate about an axis so that the seams are on one side of the front of the ball at one instant, whereas a little later they are on the other side of the front of the ball. The ball will then drift in the direction of the leading seam, and then drift back when the seam becomes exposed on the other side.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/one-hit-wonder-dickeys-knuckleball/

The ball drifts in the direction of the leading seam, which slowly moves from one side to the other.

https://www.oddball-mall.com/knuckleball/mego.htm

Low pressure draws the object towards it, so wherever the lowest pressure is on that object from moment to moment, that's where it will want to drift towards. This is known as the Magnus effect.

Translating from Chinese to English has been described as "notoriously difficult" by Google. Thinking back, I somehow tortured myself for 2 years manually translating (as well as typing and timing the sub) all those post-match interviews with the CNT players from 2018-2020 (plus some long tutorials).

https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html