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More on Statistical Language Translation
DrLudicrous writes "The NYTimes is running an article about how statistical language translation schemes have come of age. Rather than compile an extensive list of words and their literal translations via bilingual human programmers, statistical translation work by comparing texts in both English and another language and 'learning' the other language via statistical methods applied to units called 'N-grams'- e.g. if 'hombre alto' means tall man, and 'hombre grande' means big man, then hombre=man, alto=tall, and grande=big." See our previous story for more info.
France = "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey"
George Bush = "Neo-Imperialist Moron"
Tony Blair = "Lap Dog"
WMD = "No where to be found"
and of course
Dossier = Creative Story Telling
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Translation-unit this algorithm perfectly works! Deutsch this was typed and translation-unit to English makes this was!
The cake is a pie
Reminds me of story see bottom of this page
The US Gov't was funding an early computer group to translate documents from Russian-to-English and back. The hope, obviously, was to eliminate the need for human translators. A particular sentence was fed to the computer, which translated it into Russian. The computer was then fed the Russian, and it translated it back to English.
The original sentence was "The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak".
The resulting sentence? "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten".
The computer didn't know which of the many possible words to use when translating spirit, so it used "vodka". Likewise, it tried to put the word "strong" into context, and since strong vodka is prized in Russia, it decided that the vodka was good. Likewise, flesh got translated to meat, and weak flesh became bad meat.
you can see this effect in action (with the babelfish translator from altavista) here: http://www.tashian.com/multibabel
example:
Original English Text:
I am a lame anonymous coward
Translated to French:
Je suis un lache anonyme boiteux
Translated back to English:
I am a lame anonymous coward
Translated to German:
Ich bin ein lahmer anonymer Feigling
Translated back to English:
I am a lame anonymous coward
Translated to Italian:
Sono un vigliacco anonimo zoppo
Translated back to English:
They are vigliacco an anonymous cripple
Translated to Portuguese:
Sao vigliacco um o aleijado anonymous
Translated back to English:
Anonymous is vigliacco the one cripple
Translated to Spanish:
Anonimo es el vigliacco el un lisiado
Translated back to English:
Anonymous a disabled one is vigliacco
Yoda, is that you?
Black holes are where God divided by zero
FINALLY! After all these years of scrambled languages, we can finally get together and plan that tower of Babel!
Now, all we need is to pinpoint Kolob and we'll be set!
"Driving home from work with a manual transmission, wearing a dress after her shift, she had to shift her shift in order to shift."
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Your post translated as described:
Babelfish [ altavista.com ] with something type and translate of English > to German > French > English. If you are creative, you receive indeed some-of the merriest translations. If you can use words of jargon, all in general loses general context in the translation. Consequently, to pay free attention spoken foreign about films and hearing French and to read English subtitles so much outside. Simple to make against is not to You directly with English translateable, because we do not have formellement/familiar geeinbaut. Somebody that to make with an old lady on a bus says that, you do not know in France, receives you outside gemeckert.
Step 1 - "Out of sight, out of mind."
Step 2 - Step 1 machine translated to Russian
Step 3 - Step 2 machine translated back to English
Result:
"Invisible idiot"
Mr. Spock would say: Logical!