Re: [HCDX] CIA monitoring article & machine translation

["Mike Brooker" <aum108@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Facinating stuff, and I suspect that the technology will filter down to
the
> general marketplace in due course. I'm quite impressed by the very
> affordable Systran translation software, and I routinely use it to quickly
> check media news items in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish
to
> see if they're worth using for Media Network.
>
> But I have my doubts about placing too much reliance on machine
translation.
> In the the examples given, it's obvious enough that something doesn't make
> sense and needs checking. But the majority of translation problems involve
> more subtle things. For example, I've studied Russian, where many words
mean
> different things according to the context in which they're used.
Programming
> that sort of information into computers must be a nightmare. Past efforts
> have shown this. The most famous example is rendering "out of sight, out
of
> mind" as "invisible idiot".

In Russian, "mir" means both "world" and "peace".  Thus the sentence
"Sovietskii soyuz hochet mir", if heard on Radio Moscow during the heyday of
the Cold War, could mean either "The Soviet Union wants peace" or "The
Soviet Union wants the world".

I have a degree in Translation, from Laurentian University
http://www.laurentian.ca   No one took machine translation seriously when I
was a student in the 80s, and it still has a long way to go to get beyond
awkward, stilted "me Tarzan you Jane" renditions.  Because of the nuances
and subleties of languages, there will always be a need for human
translators.

Machine translation might be useful to get the gist in EE of a foreign
language web site, but I wouldn't use it to translate a reception report.

73
********************************************************************
Mike Brooker
99 Wychcrest Ave.,
Toronto, ON  M6G 3X8
CANADA
(416) 536-7406
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