My German colleagues assure me Google's neural network needs a bit more training on that one. I often use Google Translate to go back from the German I have (badly) created to English, as a further check that it's somewhat understandable. In terms of it replacing asking real humans for help... I think it's still a long way away, but good to see Google investing in it.
It clearly failed on context there - "fällig" does mean "due", but when referring to an invoice. "due" isn't used for baby delivery dates in German, the sentence would be structured differently, probably something like "Unser Baby kommt im Januar" (literally "our baby is coming in January"). That's exactly the kind of thing I hoped this new model would catch, but apparently that's still a bit too much to expect.
This one is actually not too bad - there is only a very slight difference between "due" (which can mean both something like "shall be done" and "bound to happen") and "fällig" (which means only "shall be done"). Grammatically and semantically, this almost never matters, it only misses the much higher cultural context of it being slightly weird to refer to a baby as a "task".
At least it's clearly understandable and grammatically correct, and only a slightly odd (distant) phrasing. I wouldn't be surprised at all if I heard someone saying it exactly like that in an off-the-cuff remark.
Interestingly I wouldn't know how to translate the German back to English while preserving the feel of the phrasing. Languages just don't map 1:1.
Our baby is due in January.
goes to
Unser Baby ist im Januar fällig
My German colleagues assure me Google's neural network needs a bit more training on that one. I often use Google Translate to go back from the German I have (badly) created to English, as a further check that it's somewhat understandable. In terms of it replacing asking real humans for help... I think it's still a long way away, but good to see Google investing in it.