Why does Azure Translation Service translate the name of a language to the name of the target language?

Question

When I translate a Dutch sentence to English it actually changes the meaning of the text.

When I translate the following Dutch sentence to English:

Dit is een beschrijving in het Nederlands

It gets translated to:

This is a description in English

What is that about? It also happens to other sentences like:

Kun jij Nederlands

It gets translated to:

Can you speak English

When I append a question mark it corrects the translation to:

Can you speak Dutch?

This is a major error and totally changes the meaning of the text. Please fix asap!

Answer 1

@Thomas Heijtink After checking with dev, it seems to be a known issue with Dutch translations and they are working to fix these discrepancies in future improvements to the model. There is no ETA on the fixes currently, but any improvements will be notified as part of Azure updates and I will update this thread if fixes are rolled out.

The current workaround to mitigate these scenarios seems to be by adding proper spelling, capitalization and punctuation. As you have noticed this in the last sentence with the question mark the other two sentences are also translated correctly if a full stop(period) is added to the sentences.

I understand this might need some pre-processing before passing the actual text to the API but this is the current guidance until the model is updated behind the API. I hope this helps!!.

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