Has Google Translate for web pages got a lot worse for anyone else recently?

Google Translate with Chrome used to be great at automatically translating pages from Chinese to English, but in recent months it barely works for me now on any device (mac, iphone, android). It rarely automatically translates web pages, and even when I click to do it myself, it often fails to translate the website at all. Just wondering if it’s just me or if other people have been having issues with it?

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Me, too

Ditto

The biggest problem in the Google Translate App is that since a few weeks you cannot highlight single words in a picture anymore and send then to Google translate. The bottom bar just vanishes once you select any text.
No more pinyin for me.


Yes it sucks now, takes forever to translate and fails 70% of the time

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That’s pretty odd. You mean the “Show original text” toggle button then selecting the Chinese characters, right?

It’s still working for me, but I tried just now in the FamiPort app and that option wasn’t showing up for me. It was showing up for a screenshot taken in Shopee, or if I took a screenshot in FamiPort then manually opened Google Translate and imported the screenshot. (Just to be clear, I don’t see why this should depend on the app the screenshot was taken from, but that’s what happened.)

I use that feature pretty regularly, and this is the first time I remember seeing it not being available.

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Yes. Google translate for basic text (mandarin/English) has also become much worse/China centric.

Ok I figured out how to enable it again. Switch the “show original tab”.
But the problem is it doesn’t show the pinyin anymore :frowning: also I have to enable this setting every time I use it, annoying.

Edit: Seems to be since google translate switched to google lens: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/yaf919/replacement_for_google_translate_app/


I remember a couple years back we got 中文 as no. 1 suggestion. Pretty much across the board. The subtle changes is how they win over the minds of multiple generational change.

In my opinion, LOTS of things about Google has circled the drain, not just Translate. They used to be the undisputed champ of searches, but now it’s garbage for most things I run a search for.

Google Translate used to allow changing individual words, supported Taiwanese Mandarin, unlimited length, and for most sentences, all I’d have to change was slang, context, and minor grammar, which was a major time saver when I had a side job as an interpreter translating affidavits and depos.

Now it’s 5,000 characters, and almost all words, especially parts of sentences are mainland vocabulary or a literal translation for just about everything, and it’s almost less tedious to just suck it up and type it manually, and I only use it if it’s an unfamiliar term or I’m having a hard time translating the sentence.

DeepL is slightly better, but they’d only give you simplified Chinese and you’d have to convert it back to traditional, but it’ll translate from any form just fine.

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yeah, same here. Doesn’t work at all.