{"id":1841,"date":"2012-03-20T00:57:04","date_gmt":"2012-03-19T23:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=1841"},"modified":"2012-03-20T01:05:53","modified_gmt":"2012-03-20T00:05:53","slug":"google-translates-chinese-bizarrely-poor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2012\/03\/20\/google-translates-chinese-bizarrely-poor\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloud Computing: Google Translate has stopped speaking Chinese, and we can’t get it back"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finally, I worked out how to type pinyin on a mac, using only the keyboard.<\/p>\n

\nN\u01d0 h\u01ceo!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Only, GoogleTranslate acts like a prick, and pretends it has no idea what you’re saying. This, Google, is just silly:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(for comparison, I tested – if you hit the “switch” button, and type “Hello”, you can copy the output, hit switch again, and Google still pretends you’re talking gibberish)<\/p>\n

To add insult to injury, if you don’t manually hit the “Turn OFF instant translate”, it keeps manually switching the From language … to English. Every time you type a letter, it reverts to “English –> English”. HOW MANY WORDS IN ENGLISH EVER USE ACUTE, GRAVE, OR CIRCUMFLEX? Sigh. Not very smart.<\/p>\n

Worst bit is … this was working fine a couple of months ago. Then Google “rewired it”, and now it’s broken. My friends at Google say this (constantly breaking things, never letting the user keep a working version) is “good” and “the future” because it puts control into Google’s hands: one version, on all desktops. If this is the future of Cloud Computing, Cloud Computing is dead and buried already… Version control is not a “feature”, it’s a right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finally, I worked out how to type pinyin on a mac, using only the keyboard. N\u01d0 h\u01ceo! Only, GoogleTranslate acts like a prick, and pretends it has no idea what you’re saying. This, Google, is just silly: (for comparison, I tested – if you hit the “switch” button, and type “Hello”, you can copy the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}