That's incredible. When I read the article I didn't realize I'm reading google translated version, so I thought "Igor's english is a bit broken but relatively good". I only realized I read a translation when you pointed it out. I went back to re-read the original (I'm a native russian speaker) and it's amazing how close google got to expressing the essence of every sentence.
Not only is the translation of a surprisingly high quality, but reading the original in Russian is more awkward since a lot of the technical terms are originally English. I needed to read a particular portion 3 times before I realized it meant memory allocation.
I though the same thing. I learned all the tech terms in English, so when I read "sborka musora" instead of "garbage collection" it somehow makes me smile.
Technical texts like this are relatively easy to get right. English is not my native language and when I was young I could read computer related stuff, but had trouble understanding, for example Harry Potter. If Google has an example of such a text, they can learn all the translations for all the technical terms from that data. However, a news article is much more difficult because they often have lot's of metaphors, etc. If you try to translate those, you get a lot of halve finished sentences and stuff like that.
Indeed. However though Google translate quite correctly from most common languages to English, translation to other languages (even English to French or English to Spanish) often hardly makes any sense.
Haha, I thought your reply was talking about how the V8 engine worked(translating to machine specific code), instead of the language translator used on the blog post.
It likely was not completely translated by machine. Google Translate lets anyone reading the translation edit it to fix errors. Highlight some text and notice the link that appears allowing you to "Contribute a better translation" for that particular passage.
It's more likely that it only helps train Google Translate, and doesn't actually apply any changes directly to the translated text. Otherwise vandalism would be way too easy.
The thing that led me to it was halfway through, when I moved the cursor on top of the text and there was some popup, at which point I yelled, WTH is that crap site with some broken JS advertising! I moved the mouse away but kept moving it in by pure reflex. It took me a whole minute to realize it was Google Translate.
Before I actually noticed that, "snapshot'ov" actually made me laughed, genuinely (mis)taking it for some sort of pun.
I still remember being able to play a game with one of my friends where we'd translate a sentence to German then back to English and laugh at how mangled it was…
"Number of games: We, and I have learned how to use the means for translating the German text in English is still a way of encoding their friends to play with a smile. .."