Russian #32 (0.5h)
Short conversations, and some instructional videos on YT.
Sauntering at a snail's pace similar to last week (if it's even possible to "saunter" on a single ventral foot?), I'm thoroughly exhausted and depleted. I raided my storage unit for a Christmas tree and festive decorations for the apartment yesterday, and with a little additional elbow grease from Santa's helpers, our cosy home is now looking quite "Christmassy". While playing backbreaking sliding box puzzles in the unit, I also bagged some easy reading material in Russian for future projects.
After a fortnight of test-driving the iPhone Translate app, I think it's well past time to ditch it, eat my previous words, and return to the better-the-devil-you-know Google Translate app (at least for now). The iPhone app has some nice features that Google and DeepL don't offer, and provides superior speech recognition and text-to-speech, but the translations just don't cut the mustard. My wife and I decided to compare the 3 translation apps on my phone last night by throwing them some random examples:
1. Break a leg!
2. Knock, knock!
3. I don't fancy any apples tonight.
4. I'm sick and tired of screaming kids.
Here are the results of the Jury (green for correct translations; red for incorrect):
Google Translate (Accuracy: 3/4; Total touches on screen required: 4; Speech recognition errors: 1)
1.
Удачи! (Good luck!) - Good enough, although "Ни пуха ни пера!" would have probably been better.
2.
Тук-тук! (Knock, knock!) - Who's there? Score!
3.
Я не люблю сегодня яблоки. (Today I don't love apples.) - Poor loveless apples! Unspecific time, oddly placed adverb. Perhaps "Сегодня вечером мне не хочется яблок." would work better here?
4.
Я устал от кричащих детей. (I'm tired of screaming kids.) - Pretty much nailed it!
DeepL (Accuracy: 2/4; Total touches on screen required: 15 - yes, 15!!; Speech recognition errors: 0)
1.
Сломай ногу! (Break the leg!) - Literal imperative translation, and I'm so tempted to add "Johnny" on the end...
2.
Тук-тук! - Avon lady is back again! Correct translation.
3.
Я не хочу сегодня есть "Эппл". - "Today I don't want to eat 'Apple'" - Good for you roboto-chan! Bad for me though.
4.
Я устал от кричащих детей. - Nice to see DeepL keeping up with the Googles!
iPhone Translate (Accuracy: 0/4 - как ему не стыдно!!; Total touches on screen required: 4; Speech recognition errors: It depends...see note below!*)
1.
Сломать ногу! (Break the leg!) - Sensei Kreese is getting impatient, ребята...в этом додзё милосердия не существует!
2.
Стучите! (Knock!) - Literal imperative again, formal singular/plural. Second knock is "contactless"? (Sorry, poor techie joke.)
3.
Мне не нравятся яблоки сегодня вечером. (This evening, I don't like apples.) - Nice try, but no fluffy bunny prize for you, Mr iPhone!
4.
Мне надоело кричать дети. (I'm fed up of screaming, "Children!") - Hey Wifey, I think we found our winner tonight!
* Initially, the SRS on iPhone Translate completely stopped working. Eventually, after searching the Internet for way too long, I found a solution that worked: Delete all offline language dictionaries! Tut-tut, тук-тук! Not acceptable, Apple bods!!TLDR; Google Translate uses a poor speech recognition system (SRS) and robotic TTS (text-to-speech), but still offers the most accurate translations in my experience. DeepL seems to offer improved SRS and TTS, but absolutely sucks in terms of usability and features. And iPhone Translate is flaky as hell, and despite some promising features and superior SRS and TTS (perhaps ok for RU-EN single word translations), you might as well lob a banana to Jojo the piano-playing barroom monkey and ask him to translate phrases half the time!