Kagi Translate

>What do I do with this "Error Code: 600010"?

Cloudfare, the gatekeeper of the internet, strikes again.

The usual suspects are VPN or proxy, javascript, cookies, etc.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/turnstile/troubleshooting/...

Unfortunately, even with the error code, I doubt the above page will help much.

I had tons of issues with these Cloudflare checkboxes. I finally figured out it was because I use this extension [1] that disables HTML5 autoplay. I assume Cloudflare is doing some kind of thing where they verify that the client can playback media, as they assume that headless browsers or crawlers won't have that capability

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...

Interactive captchas are one foot in the grave. With multi-modal tool-using AI models proliferating, challenge tasks that only a human can complete are vanishing. Current challenges exclude users with minor physical or mental impairments even now.

Anti-bot filters will require a different signal to determine if a physical human actually made the request.

> Afrikaans that it got wrong but I could understand as a Dutch person who doesn't even speak that language

The one language is basically a derivative of the other. Understanding and judging accuracy of translation are quite different though.

eg for me it’s the reverse - can understand large parts of Dutch due to Afrikaans. Couldn’t tell you if a Dutch sentence is correctly translated or grammatically correct though

> I can't use it because I'm not classified as "human" by a computer.

It uses Cloudflare Turnstile captcha.

The service shows no captcha to logged in Kagi users, so you can just create a (trial) Kagi account.

Zalgorythmz on crack. Brainz out of whack.

(cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalgo_text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_cocaine )

Interesting. Never had such an issue with Google. How do they do it?

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)

This is the link they gave for feedback: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5305-kagi-translate-feedback/4

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.

> 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.

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.

"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".

Interesting, I'm actually annoyed that DeepL sends every keystroke and I'm using idk how many resources on their end when I'm just interested in the result at the end and for DeepL to receive the final version I want to share with them

That it's fast, you don't have to wait much between finishing typing and the result being ready, that's great and probably better than any form system is likely to be. But if it could be a simple enter press and then async loading the result, that sounds great to me

> As long as Deepl translates asynchronously as I type, while Kagi requires a full form send & page refresh,

This leads to increased cost and we wanted to keep service free. But yes we will introduce translate as your type (will be limited to paid Kagi members).

I uninstalled the DeepL extension because it would load all its assets (fonts etc) into every. single. page. No matter the host.

Unacceptable.

This will be a paid feature apparently: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5305-kagi-translate-feedback/9

We are focusing most our resources on search (which I hope you can agree, we are doing a pretty good job at). And it turns out search is not enough and you need other things - like maps (or a browser, because some browsers will not let you change search engine and our paid users can not use the service). Both are also incredibly hard to do right. If it appears quarter-baked (and I am first to say that we can and will definetely keep imporivng improving with our products), it is not for the lack of trying or ambition but the lack of resources. Kagi is 100% user-funded. So we need users, and we sometimes work on tools that do not bring us money directly, but bring us users (like Small Web, Universal Summarizer or Translate). It is all part of the plan. And it is a decade-long plan.

Where do I find the map feature?

I'm curious to see if I can identify what data source and search software it is based on, since I've heard similar complaints about Nominatim and it is indeed finicky if you made a typo or don't know the exact address; it does no context search based on the current view afaik. Google really does do search well compared to the open source software I'm partial to, I gotta give them that

Edit: ah if you horizontally scroll on the homepage there's a "search maps" thing. Putting in a street name near me that's unique in the world, it comes up with a lookalike name in another country. Definitely not any OpenStreetMap-based product I know of then, they usually aren't unliteral like that. Since the background map is Apple by default, I guess that's what the search is as well

A quick scrape of the two sites gives (literally a diff of sets of the strings used in language selection),

In Kagi, not Google:

  Crimean Tatar
  Santali

  Crimean Tatar (Cyrillic)
  Crimean Tatar (Latin)
  French (Canada)
  Inuktut (Latin)
  Inuktut (Syllabics)
  Santali (Latin)
  Santali (Ol Chiki)
  Tshiluba

> I'm also curious to the 1 additional language that Kagi supports (Google is listed at 243, Kagi at 244)?

I just copied all of the values from the select element on the page (https://translate.kagi.com/) and there's only 243. Now I genuinely wonder if it's Pig Latin. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080562

I am very suspicious of the results. A few months ago they published a LLM benchmark, calling it "perfect" while it actually contained like only 50 inputs (academic benchmark datasets usually contain tens of thousands of inputs).

Google Translate often translates words through English.

+1

I'm also interested in the benchmarks they've use, if any.

It just uses LLMs, I've had it output a refusal in the target language by entering stuff about nukes in the input

I'm pretty sure it's just a finetuned LLM.

I have some experience experimenting in this space; it's not actually that hard to build a model which surpasses DeepL, and the wide language support is just a consequence of using an LLM trained on the whole Internet, so the model picks up the ability to use a bunch of languages.

It uses a combination of LLMs, selecting the best output. (from the blog post)

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5305-kagi-translate-feedback/22

It varies depending on the language but I find GPT4o to be good into knowing the context and go sometimes with the intent not just the grammar and rules of the language. But for most cases it is an overkill and you still have the chance of hallucination (although it has less occurrence chances in these use cases)

This is of course based on my experience using it between Arabic, English and French which is among the 5 most popular languages. Things might be dramatically different with other languages.

I don't know how the translation quality compares, but the advantages to this would be that it's free and it can translate web pages in-place.

ChatGPT does better -- it picks up context and produces more idiomatic output.

Kagi translate does pick up context (for instance, "Anne is older than her sister Carmen" is a good test for languages that have different words for older and younger sister -- Google Translate gets this wrong all the time).

But the Kagi output is stilted and grammatically incorrect for say, Cantonese.

There is no secret ingredient, Yandex just put more effort into supporting languages that are spoken in ex-USSR countries, because that's the most important market for them.

Other translation tools do not consider i. e. Kyrgyzstan an important market therefore do not put much effort into supporting Kyrgyz.

What do you miss in Kagi Search?

How would you want to see that integrated?

I assume it means they only translate what's in the HTML, not anything that's added via Javascript later.

I would guess it's only able to translate the html content sent on page load - so static webpages, but not SPAs etc.

What do you mean? Does any other translator have such a separate field that you could point to, or could you explain what you're missing?

When I want to give DeepL context, I just write it in the translation field (also, because it's exceptionally bad at single word translations, I do it even if the word should be unambiguous), so not type in "Katze" but "die Katze schnurrt" (the cat purrs). Is that the kind of thing you mean?

Fixed, thanks for reporting.