Google translate between Icelandic and English has gone from 75% useful, 25% laughable nonsense to mostly unusable in the space of a year. You used to be able to use it effectively as a dictionary. Enter a single word and you'd get the most common dictionary translation
@baldur Icelandic appears to be a forgotten language. It’s notable that Duolingo still doesn’t cover it – although that’s perhaps for the best, given its shift towards AI and automation.
It’s a bit sad that mini-G is learning Spanish and now German in Duolingo, and French at school, but we haven’t yet found a suitable means of getting Icelandic into her head, in self-learning times. (Drops was OK for vocab, but that’s all it does – nothing more.)
@baldur Might be good if she knows at least some passable Icelandic by the time we have to reapply for her Icelandic citizenship. (Which I will never stop being dumfounded that this is something we will have to do.)
It "helpfully" autocorrects Icelandic words it doesn't recognise before translation, which would be sort of okay if it worked. But it seems to recognise a fraction of the Icelandic words it used to and its autocorrections are utter garbage.
And the gaps are utterly weird. It'll handle "moltugerð" just fine, but not "sjónskekkja" or "loðna", both words that are arguably much more commonly used.
@baldur "He says that it is quite likely that the car that hissed at the kindergarten children is the same one that was spotted at Gedser Odde six months ago" - that's a one impolite car
@baldur There are some weird lacunae in Google's dictionaries of less-common languages. For example, the Google Android keyboard doesn't recognise the word "siad" in Irish. It means "they" and is about as common a word as you can find! Welsh is missing "ble" ("where")! Entering Gaelic is similarly frustrating.
@threedaymonk Apple is the same. It's keyboard frequently forgets that the word "kominn" or "arrived" exists, for example. That error noticeably first appeared when Apple rolled out its ML-based autocorrect.
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