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Translations in languages other than English are machine translated and are not yet accurate. No errors have been fixed yet as of February 20th 2021. Please report translation errors here look for the correct language translation thread. Make sure to backup your correction with sources and guide me, as I don't know languages other than English well (I plan on getting a translator eventually) please cite wiktionary and other sources in your report. Failing to do so will result in a rejection of the correction being published.
This is an article on why you should stop using Google Translate and find a more efficient, privacy-focused, and open alternative.
05.0 - Other things to check out
Like other Google products, Google Translate has a history of privacy and performance issues.
General description from Wikipedia: Google Translate - Data from Februry 23rd 2021 at 8:40:52 pm (PT: Pacific Time)
Google Translate is a free multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google, to translate text and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an application programming interface that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications. As of February 2021, Google Translate supports 109 languages at various levels and as of April 2016, claimed over 500 million total users, with more than 100 billion words translated daily.
Launched in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service, it used United Nations and European Parliament documents and transcripts to gather linguistic data. Rather than translating languages directly, it first translates text to English and then pivots to the target language in most of the language combinations it posits in its grid, with a few exceptions including Catalan-Spanish. During a translation, it looks for patterns in millions of documents to help decide on which words to choose and how to arrange them in the target language. Its accuracy, which has been criticized and ridiculed on several occasions, has been measured to vary greatly across languages. In November 2016, Google announced that Google Translate would switch to a neural machine translation engine – Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) – which translates "whole sentences at a time, rather than just piece by piece. It uses this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation, which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar". Originally only enabled for a few languages in 2016, GNMT is now used in all 109 languages in the Google Translate roster as of February 2021, except for when translating between English and Latin.
Google has a very very bad record when it comes to user privacy. (I could go on and on with evidence of this, but it took a long time to find and go through all these articles)
Privacy on Google products is always bad, due to all Google products containing spyware.
No matter what you do, when you are using Google, all of your sensitive personal data is being sent to Google and others. Google has also been spotted going through open programs. For example, from personal experience (on Firefox) with a YouTube tab open that I didn't visit, I watched several videos offline (VLC Media Player) Later when I went to check the recommendations, it was nearly everything that I had watched. There is no doubt they are spying on other programs too.
In Chrome (and many other browsers) an incognito mode is present. In Chrome, this mode is pointless, as Google will still mine your data. Even if you turn data mining/tracking off, and enable the "do not track" signal, surprise suprise, Google is still mining your data.
If you think you have nothing to hide, you are absolutely wrong. This argument has been debunked many times over:
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Edward Snowden remarked "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. "When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights."
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Daniel J. Solove stated in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education that he opposes the argument; he stated that a government can leak information about a person and cause damage to that person, or use information about a person to deny access to services even if a person did not actually engage in wrongdoing, and that a government can cause damage to one's personal life through making errors. Solove wrote "When engaged directly, the nothing-to-hide argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, the nothing-to-hide argument, in the end, has nothing to say."
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Adam D. Moore, author of Privacy Rights: Moral and Legal Foundations, argued, "it is the view that rights are resistant to cost/benefit or consequentialist sort of arguments. Here we are rejecting the view that privacy interests are the sorts of things that can be traded for security." He also stated that surveillance can disproportionately affect certain groups in society based on appearance, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion.
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Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and cryptographer, expressed opposition, citing Cardinal Richelieu's statement "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged", referring to how a state government can find aspects in a person's life in order to prosecute or blackmail that individual. Schneier also argued "Too many wrongly characterize the debate as 'security versus privacy.' The real choice is liberty versus control."
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Harvey A. Silverglate estimated that the common person, on average, unknowingly commits three felonies a day in the US.
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Emilio Mordini, philosopher and psychoanalyst, argued that the "nothing to hide" argument is inherently paradoxical. People do not need to have "something to hide" in order to hide "something". What is hidden is not necessarily relevant, claims Mordini. Instead, he argues an intimate area which can be both hidden and access-restricted is necessary since, psychologically speaking, we become individuals through the discovery that we could hide something to others.
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Julian Assange stated "There is no killer answer yet. Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) has a clever response, asking people who say this to then hand him their phone unlocked and pull down their pants. My version of that is to say, 'well, if you're so boring then we shouldn't be talking to you, and neither should anyone else', but philosophically, the real answer is this: Mass surveillance is a mass structural change. When society goes bad, it's going to take you with it, even if you are the blandest person on earth."
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Ignacio Cofone, law professor, argues that the argument is mistaken in its own terms because, whenever people disclose relevant information to others, they also disclose irrelevant information. This irrelevant information has privacy costs and can lead to other harms, such as discrimination.
Google Translate is the same as all other Google products, it contains spyware, as Google is not just a search company, they are a user data company, and you are the product. To Google, you are only worth about $700.00 (unless you are making them ad revenue)
Google Translate is an online machine translation service. It is (in my opinion) one of the 6 hardest Google products to get away from (and one of the few I am still trying to get rid of, along with YouTube, Google Play, and Android)
DeepL - DeepL is a promising machine translation platform that has much better privacy and performance than Google Translate. Originally only available in 4 languages, it is unfortunately only able to translate between 11 different languages (compared to Google Translates 109 different languages) DeepL has some helpful features that Google Translate doesn't have, and has a slight increase in accuracy.
This list is incomplete
Bing translate - Bing translate is a high level translation platform by (::) Microsoft with similar accuracy to Google Translate and support for more languages than DeepL, but suffers from privacy issues.
This list is incomplete
Google Translate uses machine translation. Currently, as of February 23rd 2021, there are no 100% accurate machine translation services, right now, Google translate is nearly as accurate as it gets, although there is still a 20-80% chance of error, depending on what you are translating to/from. Most notable translation errors occur with Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Vietnamese. Translations can come out extremely vulgar, with swear and slur words coming out of translation at times.
Google's algorithm have a history of using bad uncontrolled data that contains racism and sexism. There is a chance that Google Translate may have racial or sexist bias based on the methods of machine learning being the same.
As of late 2020, Google Translate now requires the use of a Google account for users to see their translation history, which is another step for Google trying to trap you into a Google account, which you should work on getting rid of at some point.
The Google Graveyard (killedbygoogle.com) - a sorted list of the 224+ products Google has killed
Alphabet worker union - The new workers union at Google with over 800 members
Don't want to part with the dinosaur easter egg? This website has you covered
There are other alternates, just search for them.
Some fact checking is needed for this article. This article was rushed, and more info needs to be added.
File type: Markdown (*.md)
File version: 1 (Tuesday, February 23rd 2021 at 8:53 pm)
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All of my works are free from restrictions. DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is not present in any of my works. This project does not contain any DRM
This sticker is supported by the Free Software Foundation. I never intend to include DRM in my works.
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