New On-line translation tool

"Tony Vella" wrote in message

I agree with you, a fully-reliable machine translation is still just a
pipe
dream.
Tony Vella, Ottawa, Canada
http://tv-stamps.shorturl.com

:0) Hmmm very amusing Tony.

I blame it on the Danes , they came over pillaging,
without so much as a "by your leave",
The only response was for us to steal part of their language.

I cannot recall which king finally approved legalese to be finally
represented in "English", but up till then, it was law to
have it in Latin or French.
No wonder we were a mixed up lot

Lets take a simple three letter word "tit"
it can mean
A woman's breast,
a breed of field sparrow,
a fool,
put it in a phrase and it becomes.... revenge ... "tit for tat"
put it in a sentence and it has no meaning whatsoever,
the phrase is employed so the ending sound, matches
an article the speaker refers to
"don't forget your tit for tat" ...don't forget your hat.

The whole architecture is in flux, as evidenced by
modern teens, "fully sick" is marvelous, and the latest
I hear lately ad nauseum "Chillax"... to relax.
I even note the adoption in our own family, of cute
Thai sayings already part of our intimate circle
that are used constantly in appropriate circumstances.

I once worked in the translation department of a computer company,
which shall remain unnamed for obvious reasons, and which had a
proprietary machine translation system. Of course we used to torment
the system with hoary old chestnuts like the sentence 'Time flies like
an arrow'. That was a bit unfair, but we also had a file of the
system's more entertaining failures - like its translation of the
Japanese $B%P%D%A(B 'batchi' (English 'batch') as 'long underpants'.

And yet, and yet ... A number of my clients are using machine
translation systems for rough cut translations, either to work out
whether they need a proper translation, or simply to get an idea of
what a text says. Not everyone needs a decent translation, sadly.
And, dare I say, most collectors don't need a good translation, as
long as they can make some sense of what comes out of the machine.

I doubt that we will see a decent artificial intelligence-based
machine translation system soon, but with memory and processing power
as cheap as they are, I wouldn't be surprised to see brute force
machine translation system turn out to be moderately successful.

Tony Mac Gillycuddy

In a recent message "Tony Vella" wrote:


"rodney" wrote in message
...

"Mette" wrote in message
...

Try a Danish word like "guinea pig", and you will get "prøveklud".
Correct.
But from English back to Danish the result was an animal, of which I
don't
even know the noun in English! Here is a wiki-search of what I found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_pig
Seemingly fair enough, but most certainly out of context ...

It seems to me you entered a derivative, which returned a literal,
thereby illustrating the difficulty in translation, I doubt a contextual
translator will ever be accomplished.

Hi Rod. Here's a funny one.

In 1963 the small Italian village of Longarone was buried under a mud slide
and close to 2000 villagers were killed. Until official death certificates
could be obtained from Rome, the city of Belluno issued temporary death
certificates -- the banner under the Belluno coat-of-arms reading
Certificato Provvisorio di Morte. Many years later while working at the
Foreign Languages Bureau of the Secretary of State, I entered the
information on one of these certificates into a $4000 experimental
translation software - top of the line at the time - which rendered it as
Certificate of Temporary Death. Pathetic! Unfortunately, since then
advances in machine translation have remained insignificant.

I agree with you, a fully-reliable machine translation is still just a pipe
dream.

Using a dictionary has its hazards also. My wife bought a knitting pattern
written in Norwegian while we were on holiday in Norway.
Sadly most of the words used were not in our
English-Norwegian dictionary at all! Fortunately my wife is a very
experienced knitter, and she produced an amazinginly warm Norwegian
style sweater which I still wear now some years later.

Another problem was that Norwegian knitting techniques clearly differed
from her normal style; she just modified the pattern to suit herself, a
skill which I greatly admired.

She enjoys a challenge...

--
Tony Clayton
Coins of the UK : http://www.coins-of-the-uk.co.uk
Sent using RISCOS on an Acorn Strong Arm RiscPC
.... Mental Floss prevents Moral Decay.