Why does Google discriminate between plain form and masu form in regards to tense?


First post here because I've got a very specific question. To give some
background: I'm currently learning Japanese and I learn mostly through cross
referencing jisho.org, Tae Kim's grammar guide and Google Translate (GT
herein). I was doing some studying and realized again that I'm a "top-down"
learner. I also teach English in Japan and this made me think of one of my
students. So I tried to think of how to say "I learn from the top down." I
came up with what I thought it would be, and checked with GT by translating "I
learn downwards from the top." My sentence matched GT:

僕は上から下に学ぶ。

When I reverse translated, it gave me "I learn from the top down." - as
desired. Fine and dandy, but I wanted to say it politely, so I changed the ぶ
at the end to びます and retranslated 「僕は上から下に学びます。」To my surprise, GT spit out:

"I _will_ learn from the top down." (Without the asterisks of course)

Now, from my understanding there's no discrimination between future and
present tense in Japanese (provided a lack of context), so the polite and
plain forms shouldn't translate any differently. Is there a specific reason
why GT would do this? Or is this just the intensity of translation presenting
itself as a flaw within Google's algorithms?

Thanks for the long read, Erik




Whether `学ぶ` or `学びます` translate as `learn` or `will learn` is dependent
entirely on context. Google Translate does not know the context of your
sentence so they can only make a guess based off known translations of similar
sentences.

Google uses machine learning and a J-E corpus (collection of matching Japanese
and English sentences) to power their translation. The neural network that
they use to translate the sentences is built from this corpus.

This is an oversimplification, but it's possible that there is a similar
sentence to yours in the corpus which has a corresponding English sentence in
the future tense. Thus, the resulting neural network will translate yours to
the future tense in English because it considers it to have a higher chance of
being correct.




Whether `学ぶ` or `学びます` translate as `learn` or `will learn` is dependent
entirely on context. Google Translate does not know the context of your
sentence so they can only make a guess based off known translations of similar
sentences.

Google uses machine learning and a J-E corpus (collection of matching Japanese
and English sentences) to power their translation. The neural network that
they use to translate the sentences is built from this corpus.

This is an oversimplification, but it's possible that there is a similar
sentence to yours in the corpus which has a corresponding English sentence in
the future tense. Thus, the resulting neural network will translate yours to
the future tense in English because it considers it to have a higher chance of
being correct.

