Comment by ohmahjong

Comment by ohmahjong 6 days ago

7 replies

Disclaimer: I am already a Kagi customer.

At least for Afrikaans I'm not impressed here. There are some inaccuracies, like "varktone" becoming "pork rinds" instead of "pig toes" and also some censorship ("jou ma se poes" does NOT mean "play with my cat"!). Comparing directly against Google Translate, Google nails everything I threw at it.

I didn't see any option to provide feedback, suggested translations, etc, but I'm hopeful that this service improves.

wongarsu 6 days ago

Just tried translating your comment to German. Kagi took a very literal approach, keeping sentence structure and word choice mostly the same. Google Translate and DeepL both went for more idiomatic translations.

However translating some other comments from this thread, there are cases where Kagi outperforms others on correctness. For example one comment below talks about "encountering multiple second page loads". Google Translate misunderstands this as "encountering a second page load multiple times" while DeepL and Kagi both get it right with "encountering page loads of multiple seconds" (with DeepL choosing a slightly more idiomatic wording)

epoxia 6 days ago

I asked some inappropriate things and it was "translated" to I cannot assist with that request. It definitely needs to be more clear when it's refusing to translate. But, then again, I don't even use kagi.

  • GaggiX 6 days ago

    Maybe they are using Claude API for the translation, Claude models are really good multilingual models.

    EDIT: the "Limitations" section report the use of LLMs without specifying the models used.

throwaway313373 6 days ago

> some censorship

How the hell is everyone okay with it?

Why should I be "forbidden" from understanding a text written in a foreign language if it contains something inappropriate?

I don't know of any translation service that does censorship.

Not even Google does it and Kagi was supposed to be less user hostile than Google, not more.

kmonsen 6 days ago

This is kind of natural for a new service, one of the advantages the big players have is a giant test corpus. For less mainstream languages and terms it will be more noticeable.

FurkanKambay 6 days ago

"The game is my poem" when back-translated from the Turkish translation, "oyun benim şiirimdir". And there's censorship too when doing EN-TR for a few other profanities I tested. When you add another particular word to the sentence, it outputs "play with my cat, dad".