Comment by colordrops

I tried some Chinese news sites, and more than one paragraph was translated to English perfectly. Very impressive. But my Chinese wife asked me to put in some text from Weibo, China's Twitter clone, and the translations were nearly incomprehensible. She insisted that the samples we chose were not slang but were everyday colloquial Chinese that is easily understood by anyone. My guess is that Google's training set is mainly Chinese news sites, which are a formal type of Chinese that is quite different from spoken Chinese. I wonder if they can scrape Weibo messages to improve their translations.