Google translation requests not working the first time

I’m not sure if its strictly a google translate issue, but many times, when I highlight a chunk or a whole sentence to get a translation, the result in the right panel is an exact copy of what I selected. So, no translation, just kanji & hiragana. I then have to click de “x” symbol next to my selection, and redo the selection. Then it works. Its probably safe to say it happens 50% of the time.

The problem happens in japanese. I use chrome. Dont know if that information helps.

Sorry if it has already been mentionned. I took a minute to google the question to make sure its not a duplicate, but wasnt sure how to formulate it.

@eturgeon - Thanks for the heads up. I’ve actually noticed this myself when LingQing, but wasn’t sure if it was just a temporary glitch or something on Google’s end. I’ll pass this along to our development team to see if it might be something on our end or something that Google needs to fix.

Thank you for your reply!

It’s been happening in Italian also.

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any chance to see a correction? Kind of irritating.

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Sorry to hear this is still giving you trouble. When the original post was made it seemed to be very frequent, though shortly after it seemed to subside. A refresh does seem to help in the meantime, though when we immediately looked into this we didn’t see anything obvious on our end that would be causing this. How frequently is this happening to you now?

I would say it started out as infrequent but now it happens just about every time. I figure that maybe it’s just a way for you to decrease the cost of using Google Translate.

During my last reading, maybe it happened 6-7 times, I dont remember. Maybe its half the time I selected a phrase. But right now I’m trying to reproduce the problem by selecting random text and It never happens.

I just reproduced it. And here’s the answer from google, the jSON is empty:

{“translations”: [{“translatedText”: “”}]}

oops I thought the answer was directly from google, but no lingq is the intermediare:

So the problem may be on your end. Are there cases when you have problems interpreting the response from google?

In my case, I rely a lot on it to be able to grasp the meaning of sentences. In many cases, the result is hard to interpret since google is bad at translating japanese, but at least I get the general sense of the text.

Thanks for this additional information - this should be useful to figuring out whether there’s something we can do to make this more reliable!

Up!
any development? It’s still doing it. I was wondering if some solution had been found.

I checked back and we did try to reproduce this but were having trouble getting it to happen consistently so we decided to put it on the back burner for the time being. I checked again, going through around 300 separate words, and I only noticed this happening once where there was an actual definition. It happened some other times in some combinations, but when I went to translate.google.com and typed in the word it was showing a blank definition there too.

How often would you say this is happening for you? Meaning, around how many times in a hundred? Are you able to get this to happen consistently, or does it still to be random?

During an hour, maybe I have to check 30 times for translations, and the problem happens half the time. And when it happens, it will keep happening 2, 3, 4 times for the same chunk, until it get it right. If I had a “retry” button It’d be already easier than to have to reselect the zone, which means to first deselect, but then I hit by mistake the word next to it which becomes selected itself, etc. Do you have an easy javascript function I could call with a key stroke? I’d be glad to do it with tampermonkey.

Tonight I’ll count how many times it happens.

  1. failed once
  2. did not fail
  3. failed once
  4. did not fail
  5. failed 3 times before working
  6. failed 3 times before working

I must have forgot to note some of them. I also forgot to note the duration of the session.

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Glad you mentioned it. Happens to me often, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all.

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Getting to be irritating now.