That's really poor Dutch...

#1
by merlinfrombelgium - opened

Hi Benjamin,

Been following your blog since only a few weeks and learnt a lot already. Keep up the writing please!!

As a native Dutch speaker and self-proclaimed linguist, I just wanted to comment on the sample phrases in this dataset. They're really... bad... πŸ€” It looks like they were translated from English or another language by a translation engine and then "matched" to their supposed English translation.
Some of the phrases aren't even proper Dutch, full stop.

This is not targeted at you as a negative critique. Rather as a start to a conversation on where these datasets come from and if they're curated. No, I haven't googled it to find out :)

The Kaitchup org

Hi,

Yes, I'm not surprised by your observations. Most of the text in OPUS that is not English is translated from English. And a very large part of this translation was not done by professional translators.
The translation process could be described like this, where X is any language:
X -> translation into English (by professional, crowd sourcing, or machine translation...) -> Translation into Dutch (by professional, crowd sourcing, or machine translation...)
So many things can go wrong in this process!

Curating the datasets would work to some extent.

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