English Translation
That’s why I have such an extreme hatred for him.
Translation is blatantly false. “That’s why I hate him so much.” fixed it
Oh the irony that my post gets flagged because I was the one who wasn’t civilized, and not the one who keeps trash talking about all the sentences translated by human native speakers.
No, I will not stop being so aggressive about it.
Yeah, I’d imagine. The first thing the guidelines state is that This is a Civilized Place for Public Discussion.
How about you actually acknowledge my numerous replies to your poor dismission of my comments.
What? Where? This is the first time you actually replied (that I’m aware of anyway).
You only seem to pick the ones where I don’t go further into it.
I pick the ones where I can actually give a reason why the translator may have chosen a particular translation, or chose to rephrase because german just doesn’t put it the same way english does. This and I don’t always have the time (when at work), or the will to reply to a simple nitpick.
your arrogance on this is obnoxious.
Have you read the guidelines? I just did, because my post got flagged. I’m sure you’re just as guilty now, which rests my case.
Besides, it’s not arrogance when I’m just trying to explain how these sentences came to be, and that languages don’t always correspond word for word. Embrace the differences, that’s the beauty of languages. Learning a language should be an interesting journey, not a chore.
And why are you so adamant about “that’s not how languages are taught”? Clozemaster is just another learning tool with a different approach. It teaches you how to express things idiomatically, because the sentences are written by native speakers. As I said, if you just want to learn vocab, use flashcards, as clozemaster is obviously not the right tool for you.
I am going to have you translate them for me and you must do so exactly as they say the answer is
… with something so unacceptably rigid as ClozeMaster where only ONE answer is allowed
You know, that’s what the hint feature is for. Instead of ranting on the forum and “fixing” the sentences, you could simply give yourself a hint what kind of answer/word that sentence expects.
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You didn’t address the discrepancies between the “explain”, the “highlight”, and the provided translations.
Why, when I input the same horribly translated sentence into ChatGPT or DeepL, does it give me 3-5 possible answers in German and NOT ONE is even close to the translations ClozeMaster gives?
How do they expect you to translate a word to German when the word they are asking for that is blank, could be between 2-5 answers, but it will ask for ONLY an answer to a translation that isn’t there/is wrong.
I keep telling you this, unless you plan on having people simply memorize the phrase when they want to use, not knowing the proper translation won’t help at all.
But here, (and this should be 10x easier for you as a native German speaker, let alone people learning), translate this to German for me please:
“You’re wide off the mark.”
Just humor me and give it a go, hell, even give me a couple if you’d like.
And what do you mean by “My post got flagged”? I didn’t report or flag any of your comments, I don’t do that to people, no matter how much I disagree. Unless you mean a notification?
You didn’t address the discrepancies between the “explain”, the “highlight”, and the provided translations.
The sentences were written by humans and come from tatoeba, or more precisely some 10 year old snapshot of the tatoeba database.
The translation in the popup that appears when you highlight words is done by google translate. It even says “translated by Google”.
The explanation feature is text generated by ChatGPT. There has been a discussion recently about the usefulness and the impact on the environment in another thread: Please consider removing the Explain feature entirely
Why, when I input the same horribly translated sentence into ChatGPT or DeepL, does it give me 3-5 possible answers in German and NOT ONE is even close to the translations ClozeMaster gives?
Because there’s many ways to skin a cat…? A literal translation is not the only way to translate an idea, and quite often not the best choice.
And in most cases I would say it’s because some english idiom is hard to translate to german. As I mentioned, most of the time the english sentence is there first, and the german sentence is a translation of the english one, and it’s rarely the other way around.
I keep telling you this, unless you plan on having people simply memorize the phrase when they want to use, not knowing the proper translation won’t help at all.
It’s only a problem when you see the sentence for the first time. Then you either remember the phrase or install a hint for next time. Heck, “fix” the sentence if you want, I don’t care. Just keep it to yourself and don’t spam the forum with rants. I’m happy to discuss the reasons and rationales, it’s just that a rant is not a good starting point for a civilized discussion.
translate this to German for me please:
“You’re wide off the mark.”
Off the top of my head I would say “Du liegst weit daneben.” or maybe “Du liegst völlig falsch.”, plus the formal “Sie” variants.
“Du bist weit von der Markierung” would be “cheese”. (See #2 at Käse - Wiktionary, the free dictionary).
And so would be “You lie far next to it”, of course.
And what do you mean by “My post got flagged”? I didn’t report or flag any of your comments, I don’t do that to people, no matter how much I disagree. Unless you mean a notification?
Well, it’s nice to know that it wasn’t you. But it doesn’t matter.
The guidelines basically say never to address the tone of a post, only the content, and never to get personal.
These rules may be appropriate for customer support employees, but in my opinion, reminding someone to keep it civilized also belongs to a civilized discussion. But it’s their rules and I broke them. Mea culpa.
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You know, @misbach2194, you’re on my ignore list for a while now, for exactly the reasons @pitti42 states. Please remember: we’re all unpaid volunteers. We don’t have to help you, but we do it anyway. But every time we volunteer our time to help you, you dismiss our answers as “blatantly false” in a very aggressive and hostile manner, simply because they’re not literal enough for your taste. Not only are you wrong but also disrespectful. We’re native speakers. Claiming that we don’t know our own language very well does not make me feel like wanting to help you any further. Please rethink your approach to talking with volunteers, in your own best interest.
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Blockquote Off the top of my head I would say “Du liegst weit daneben.” or maybe “Du liegst völlig falsch.”, plus the formal “Sie” variants.
“Du bist weit von der Markierung” would be “cheese”. (See #2 at Käse - Wiktionary, the free dictionary).
And so would be “You lie far next to it”, of course.
“Du liegst mit deiner Vermutung völlig daneben” is the German sentence provided. You provided 3 answers, and none of them were correct. They were close, but the complete omission of “mit deiner Vermutung” is ridiculous, unless you’d suggest that “mit deiner Vermutung” (with your assumption) should be implied and left out, but how would a learner ever, possibly, in any world, know that?! Especially if the blank is like this: “Du liegst mit deiner ________ völlig daneben” but the English translation has that translation I mentioned before. Also, the fact that this answer could have 10+ answers but ONLY Vermutung would be accepted.
This has been my entire compliant in every one of my “rants”, its not that there are different translations, its that the English translations will completely omit or change entire words or what is being said in German. I have 100s of examples of this, maybe 1,000s at this point. However, I have learned from this, instead of just blasting the horrible translations, I post the entire answer from the “explain” button.
Congratulations. You have found the first example where I actually agree with you.
Everything davidculley has just summed up so nicely still applies, however.
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I think there is a massive misunderstanding as I continue to read your responses. I am not coming at the German sentences… I am coming at the English translations that completely omit or ignore multiple words from the German sentence. Read my last comment to Pitti to see what I mean.
Perhaps I am too aggressive about it, however, it is getting extremely frustrating that I need to continuously fix these sentences.
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Please don’t. Such posts will get flagged as spam.
That is 1 of 1,000s I’ve had to fix… Maybe when I post my “this translation is false” you can’t see what was there before because I’ve already changed it. That wasn’t the first example, its what I’ve been saying all along. Everytime you have commented on one of my comments, I was correcting that kind of issue. The whole time you weren’t understanding me, and that was my fault for not explaining myself correctly
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Okay. fair enough, I won’t do that anymore
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Maybe when I post my “this translation is false” you can’t see what was there before because I’ve already changed it.
You’re not the first person this has happened to. It’s very confusing when what you see doesn’t seem to be what a person is talking about.
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“Du liegst mit deiner Vermutung völlig daneben”
Take a look at the source of the sentence on tatoeba: You're wide of the mark. - Beispielsatz Englisch- Tatoeba
and the page of the german translation: Du liegst mit deiner Vermutung völlig daneben. - Beispielsatz Deutsch- Tatoeba
There are three things to note:
- There’s multiple translations, one of which is “Your assumption is completely wrong.”, which was probably added because there was no mention of “Vermutung” in the english sentence.
- The comments below mention the lack of a corresponding word, as well as the misspelling of “off”.
- The english sentence was originally “Your guess is wide of the mark.” but was later changed to just “You’re wide of the mark.”
And there’s three factors at play which can lead to questionable translations on clozemaster:
- The database snapshot is old, and therefore fixes that have been done on tatoeba since then aren’t reflected.
- Changing a sentence after it has been translated, as has happened in this case, can lead to mismatches or poor translations.
- There are multiple translations, even second degree translations (i.e. via a third language), and so doing what clozemaster does, and that is picking two sentences randomly that are supposed to be equivalent translations of each other, does not always result in good pairs.
In any case, this just goes to show that a database is only as good as the maintenance done by humans, and without human curation the results are sometimes flaky.
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This explains a lot, and thank you. Now I understand the cause/reasoning. Sorry about that, learning German is already frustrating enough, sometimes I lose my cool a bit
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