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Copier Auto-Translates Japanese to English
StCredZero writes "Wild. Fuji has created a photocopier that automatically translates documents from Japanese to English. That's pretty nuts. Apparently, the copier can figure out what sections are text, OCR the text, send it to a translation engine, and put the english back into place."
Turn into actual pictures of people, too! Amazing!
They've been using this for years to translate instruction manuals.
Imagine if you upload manga scans to Flickr, and it automatically translates them to English.
Imagine if you upload anime to YouTube, and it automatically includes an English subtitle.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
StCredZero "writes wildness. Fuji drew up the photocopying machine which automatically translates the document from English from Japanese. That is the clean nut. With respect to appearance, as for the copier the text, as for OCR what kind of section text, to send that to the translation engine, and in the place English". You reset, or can grasp.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
It translates to Engrish?
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
It doesn't seem to be mentioned in TFA, but I have to wonder: Exactly how fast does it copy if it has to translate? I'm sure it's not the near-instantaneous work we've come to expect of our Xeroxes. If the translations aren't just gibberish Engrish, its usefulness will be immense, so the time won't be so much of a concern; but I do still wonder.
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smoke, and have sex. Put this in your sig if you like bagels.
"Why, so can I, or so can any man, But will they come when you do call for them?"
--Shakespeare, Henry IV, pt. One, act III
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The version I want is where I scan in a Tenner, the machine sends it to a "Translation Engine" & the output is a Score :-)
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
You have no chance to survive make your time. :)
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Between the inaccuracy of unproofed OCR and the poor quality of machine translation, I can't imagine that the results are very good.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
I think of that this is rather sweet. As for converting Japanese rather than easy, converting other manner with a certain manner, with other manner hard. As for existence of Chinese character, for example, thing is made easier. But (with easily from Chinese character. Chinese which becomes complete)
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Looks like any machine that can produce a full page from one language to Japanese, English, Korean and both chinese character set(Mainland vs Taiwan classical) within an hour would be a winner. Unfortunately if there is no proofreader, the whole process will result in failure, embarassment and red faces...
Hey, I just got one of these and all it'll print is "All your base are belong to us."....
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
[Reading from his book, "Jimmy James: Macho Business Donkey Wrestler," translated to Japanese and back again]
Jimmy: I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business comes to my hut. Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute, for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo...
[pauses while turning page]
Jimmy: dung.
Finally! Now I can pour my collection of Hentai into one and enjoy the interesting story lines and character development...
But I wonder does the english language contain enough exclamations though: Uh!, Ah! ?
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I can't wait to see the translator mangle translations.
...for a machine, under the current paradigms (that is, no true artificial intelligence) to properly translate something. Translation is not an exact science, and you can't expect to get a decent translation by just having a word-per-word approach. Heck, not even a sentence-per-sentence or paragraph-per-paragraph approach would ever be enough. Translation requires deep social knowledge--you need to know what you are translating, from whom you are translating, for whom you are translating... that is, you need to enclose your translation in a sociological context. No machine can ever wish to do that without artificial intelligence. It's hard enough as it is to get a human being to understand that word-per-word translation is stupid--imagine telling that to your CPU core.
;)
Disclaimer: I'm a translation student myself
You fail it!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Don't ask about the jointly developed update to the Hitachi Magic Wand. Just don't ask.
"Wildness. Fuji drew up the photocopying machine which automatically translates the document from English from Japanese. That is the clean nut. With respect to appearance, as for the copier the text, as for OCR what kind of section text, to send that to the translation engine, and in the place English". You reset, or can grasp
If you sit on the glass and photocopy your ass, it just switches to "Enlarge by 50%" mode.
Did you translate this post on the copier?
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
They probably used it to translate the instruction manual into Engrish.
Most of the stuff on
-FL
Too bad it can't translate the article fast enough.
Google cache: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:iMyv1y2mOAkJ:www.digitalworldtokyo.com/index.php/digital_tokyo/articles/photocopier_translates_japanese_to_english_at_touch_of_button+http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/index.php/digital_tokyo/articles/photocopier_translates_japanese_to_english_at_touch_of_button/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=us&strip=1
This may help people from making some big mistakes with their tats...
If I am in a rush, I would much rather have the "Engrish" translation than a bunch of Chapanese hyroglighic gobbledeegook.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Instead of the next guy complaining he's getting duplex and stapling, you'll have him pulling the box apart to figure out why it's in a foreign language. Helpdesk fun for all.
They did something like this with a Japanese car manual a long time ago; it ended up something like: "If a passenger of foot should obstacle your passage, tootle the horn. Tootle him melodiously at first, but if he continues obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor."
...before we see photos of the scanned documents in http://www.engrish.com/ ... What were they thinking of??
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
Our those which achieve the main thing of the ether of title in order to know never clearly that remnant because of the remainder which it should find!
Since I could never have created the above err, prose, myself, I typed the following answer into babelfish and translated it into Japanese, and for good measure, back into English.
Clearly that remains for those of us who have achieved the title Ether Lord to know, and for the rest never to find out!
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
hahaha-where are my mod points when I need them! :)
Either you are old, or a bit naive. I think in the next 10 years we will see significant improvement.
Yeah, 'cause researchers have long promised us that AI will reach us in 10 years. <sarcasm>
Seriously, I think you underestimate the difficulty of translating. Have you done any major foreign-language translation -- especially of conversational speech? My experience has primarily been with Japanese and English, and I'll tell you right now that it can be nightmarish.
Sentence fragments are the worst part. Japanese has a completely different word order from English. All modifiers (including phrases and clauses) come before the word they modify, and the language has a Subject-Object-Verb order. "I just saw the man who stole my friend's watch last Tuesday" becomes "Just I Last Tuesday friend's watch stole man saw." Now try translating that from Japanese to English when the sentence is cut in half.
Worse, the language has very different levels of allowed vagueness. "Complete" sentences in Japanese can contain just a descriptor or an action without any specification of who did/was what. Conversely, translating "3 of them" in English to Japanese is hard because you have to know "3 of what?" to know what counting suffix to use.
Another problem is that many very different words sound exactly the same when conjugated to the gerund or perfective forms. English has a number of homonyms, but there are MANY more opportunities for mix-ups if you don't have access to kanji to tell the semantic meaning apart because Japanese has a much more limited range of phonemes. For example, take "katte" which is the gerund form of the verbs "kau" (buy), "kau" (keep/raise), "karu" (cut), "karu" (spur on), and "katsu" (win). That's 5 completely different verbs that conjugate to the same sound. If they're written phonetically or your going from speech, then you have to be able to understand the meaning behind the words to translate. (Did I mention earlier that you may not have an explicit subject and object to go off of?)
Then you get into issues of translating things like politeness levels, different ways of addressing people, and other concepts that don't translate well into English or concepts like singular vs. plural that are dropped in going to Japanese. Let's not even consider puns and poetry!
These are not trivial issues. An automatic translator would need to somehow be able to conceptualize what a person is trying to speak about, which would require understanding the story being told and an ability to predict where they are going with it. This will require strong AI.
Accurate and intelligible translation is an art -- not a science -- because it requires an intuitive and empathetic ability to understand the mind of the speaker well enough to map their thoughts into a different method of expression.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Pretty soon, you'll be hearing this at the office: "Damn copier! First, I got a paper jam. I finally got that fixed - but my hands are all covered in toner. Now, all my documents are coming out in a different language! What's going on? I can't even tell what language this is! Grrrrrr"
Is it standalone, or does it phone home? If it sends the content out for translation, it's a huge security hole for an organization.
They show a picture of the machine, I see. But what they don't show a picture of, is the before / after pictures in various languages. I'm not impressed.
This is vely intelesting! Vely!
Doshte nobody invented befole, I don't know! Cullently I'm using baka velsion online; it wolks pelfectly!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
What is wild is that anyone with half a working braincell would use a photocopier in an office where a copy of every document is sent to an uncontrolled 3rd party for translation.
Yeah, put that baby in the CEO's office..
(not the mention the fact that there's a huge gap between mechanical translations and the subtleties of language only a skilled translator and/or native speaker has any hope of translating).
So, IMHO cute idea, but don't expect me to bu one any time soon.
Insert
Common exercise: take the article, drop its text into Babelfish, translate it from English to and back again. When doing so from English to Japanese and back, the results are:
Something has been lost, I think. Let's try a quick trip through Europe, though. English to Spanish, Spanish to French, French to German, and German back to English:
Honestly, I'm impressed, "as the fish and Google of Babel translate."
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
My street is taken over by Latino gangs. (Most of the gang members are kids from Central America.) These guys hang out in front of my building selling rock all day.
The owner's had cameras installed to deter the selling of crack in front of the building. The problem is, nobody cared. The cameras are small and not easily seen. They went about slingin' rock as usual.
I decided to print up a sign with a big camera on it. I typed out something like "This building is watched by Surveillance Cameras. Any illegal activity will be recorded and taken to the police." (Don't worry all you privacy zealots, the police don't care about recordings of gangs dealing crack. I tried. I just want them and the crackheads they attract to go elsewhere.)
The problem is, they don't speak English and I don't speak Spanish. Rather than ask somebody I went to Babelfish and typed it in and pasted it into my nifty sign.
I posted these signs all around the building. An hour later they were all gathered around one sign laughing at the ridiculous translation. They took them down to show to their friends. Apparently the were really funny.
You can still buy crack in front of my building.
OCR for more than 5000 Kanji character could be very tricky. I would buy one when it can read handwriting.
"Fuji Xerox's secret lies in networking the unnamed copier to a dedicated translation server and combining this with algorithms that can distinguish between text, drawings and lines for maintaining page layouts."
:)
It is called outsourcing
I to buy that exactly, to type this short text, and from Japanese from English
You tried in order to translate. As for that you see rather in me
It is good, don't you think? so is?
I'm not worried. Or, as this copier would say, The troubling one it is to have [indef. pron] not very and much.
you are in a foreign country and you want to say something to a local. Dial up a number on your mobile, say what you want to say and either the translation gets spoken back to you or it turns up, a few seconds later, in a text. I know speech recognition is a bit harder than OCR but it's only a matter of time before they perfect it.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Why is this modded 'troll'? He's perfectly right, machine translation might not be sufficient for business transactions and classy conversation, but when you just want to know enough about what the hell those squiggly drawings mean to determine the subject matter, this would be perfect! Hell, usually a datasheet is readable after being machine translated, even if the grammar IS a little funky.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
As an research chemist for a large company, I have had to teach myself the unique language of machine translated Japanese for when I'm in literature search mode. We pay $30 a pop for an instantaneous machine translated JP patent through a web-based service. The service is tuned to patent phrases so not as bad as Engrish, but it takes getting used to. The translations are good enough to get the gist, but if the reference is going to be used as prior art for a patent filing, we'll spring for a human translation which costs a whole lot more and takes a lot more time to get. I wonder how this copier would stack up against the service we use in a cost/benefit analysis?
If only people listened to that advice. We could certainly do with some more melodious tootling in the streets...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I read via another /. story recently that automated voice translation on the fly is a hot issue for darpa these days. I wonder if the algo used by this OCR method would be of any assistance in getting a two-stage unit that uses voice recognition off the ground?
Because he put in as many derogatory terms as he could think of. If he'd simply stated it like you had (minus 'squiggly drawings') he'd probably have gotten 'insightful' instead.
... Ugh. I don't care about all that when I'm in a hurry, I just wanted to know it said 'Stick the bulb in the socket and spin clockwise.' (Not a real example. Heh.)
I'm know I've used online translation services when I absolutely needed to know what something said and there was no native speaker around. In fact, since native speakers are generally unsure of exact translations (despite speaking both languages fluently) I find the poor translations online better than 'well, it means this, but there's this connotation and...'
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Obviously the translator was all at sea.
Pining for the fjords
I guess derogatory is in the eye of the beholder - I definitely didn't mean anything bad by the 'squiggly lines' comment, that's just what most foreign alphabets look like to me. I can read Normal (English). I recognize, but can't read, Englishy Things (anything using a basic Latin alphabet), Calculus (Greek), Backwards Letters LOL (Russian/Cyrillic), Sideways Funny Pictures (heiroglyphics), Snail Poo (any of a number of languages from the Middle East), Honda Accord Stickers (Japanese), and Funny Stick People (Chinese). Then there's all the bazillion others that look like either the last two, or don't. I'd fully expect Englishy Things to look like random squiggles or Backwards Russian or something to someone who can't decipher Latin-esque alphabets.
:)
Good point about the TMI factor when getting a human to translate. Nothing worse than "It means, let me see... you have to add the seasoning in step 5. Or wait, that could be 'your wife is hot' depending on context. It's also vaguely insulting." when all you want to know is whether to put the freakin' seasoning or boiling water in first.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
What does it do when the translated text doesn't fit the original layout? Resize the font to an unreadable size?
Fuji Xerox's secret lies in networking the unnamed copier to a dedicated translation server and combining this with algorithms that can distinguish between text, drawings and lines for maintaining page layouts.
In other words, it's not a translation box at all. It's a networked scanner/copier that passes the scan to a server parked somewhere else to modify the page and send it back to the printer.
To call it a translator without mentioning the big box sitting across the office that goes with it, is a bit fraudulent. Reminiscent of the chess playing robot frauds of years back, that were run by a chessmaster hiding somewhere nearby running the mannequin.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
This is no more amazing than taking your desktop OCR software, scanning a page, pasting the result into Google Translate, and printing the resulting page. The reason nobody is shipping this is because the translation isn't good enough yet to make it worthwhile.
Well, I mean the packing list includes a "for glue the sex rubber mat" -- so it can't possibly be that bad, could it? Actually, ew. It's an ethernet switch. I really don't want to know what that bit's for!
It sounds like they've come up with the greatest invention of all time - an ethernet switch that allows you to completely circumvent the computer and have your pr0n delivered directly to the ultimate....ah...consumer. God bless those crazy bastards.
I've played around with a lot of OCR technology and I have to say, it just doesn't work perfectly yet. Anyone looking to just get text recognized, they'd better be prepared to run it through a word processor and give it an additional proofreading. And we also know how effective babelfish is. So we're to expect that they can take raw text freshly OCR'd, run it through a babelfish workalike and get something out the other end that doesn't read like a poorly translated engrish technical manual? Or do they just have very low expectations?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
That's the fun part of these automatic translators - put in perfectly good English, translate to a foreign language, and translate back to English. Good fun for a rainy afternoon.
"Today is under construction... please do not be alarmed by the construction men hanging themselves from outside your balcony. We will take them down tomorrow..."
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Okay, OCR a page of text. You'll probably end up with 5% typos. Now pass that through a machine translator. Laugh at the results. From a Russian cruise ship notice: Behold many whistles! Pursue life savering equipments and bang convolve across the bosoms. Flee then to the indifferent career ships whereast obediencing the orders of the vessel chef. ... and so on from 3454 web sites that collect broken English.
Someone should make a prank copier which uses OCR and replaces some words in the document you make a "copy" of... Replace all occurrences of "dear" with "esteemed yet stupid", "boss" with "monkey boy", "accounting" with "bean-counters", "engineers" with "propeller heads", and "best regards" with "Die in a fire".
Esteemed yet stupid monkey boy,
Today I discussed our finances with the bean-counters office. They stated that the propeller heads are having a problem getting enough supplies to finish the project this week. How should I approach this problem?
Die in a fire,
- Worker name
If there's anyone I hate more than stupid people, it's intellectuals.
"Please to be doing the needful"
I seem to recall reading that in the book "The Mother Tongue", by Bill Bryson. Quite funny, except I believe that was not machine-translated. Actually, that makes it even funnier.
If a Japanese receptionist sits on the copier, does it switch between portrait & landscape mode ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Don't to be when standing on the cable meeting room be racist! Humoristic jokes are hided in writtings formulas, not with facials. Person might remove barricade.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Now they can more efficiently create terrible manuals.
The thing is, you actually see stuff like this in Japan. A lot. Here are some pics from my last trip:
"Sufficient" T-shirt
"Variously Type" shirt
Toyota "Noah" (they had all sorts of hilarious car names)
"It Is Strong In Time..." pachinko parlor ad
"Drunkard Eradication" shirt
Giant sign on warehouse that simply says, "Boom"
"It can enjoy the internet for 100 yen" (the screen also said a bunch of other funny stuff)
"Tasteful coffee have you refresh and relux"
Gap ripoff brand: "Eap"
"Labio" brand "Heart Milk", whatever that is
"Today Humming" car (tomorrow, not so much?)
"Welcome To The Ice Shop..." (my favorite: "You are the crown of the head / Suffered direct hit / You will enjoy the cool breeze")
Toyota "Royal Saloon" car (they spell "Salon" as "Saloon"; there's a whole line of "Saloon" vehicles)
Crunky, the candy bar
"Blendy" instant coffee and "Creap" creamer (Creap: The Creamy Powder!)
"Let's enjoy smoking and keep manner" trashcan
Guide of guest room telephone (an entire page of Engrish that I kindly corrected for them)
"I love basket ball very very" graffiti
And to think I didn't take pictures of most of the Engrish (would have taken way too long). Including the very first ticket I bought, in Osaka, which was a "No My Car Day" subway ticket.
(change "small" to "large" in the URL for full-sized versions)
Kneel Before Christ!
These guys saying that the technology won't be here within their lifetime have to be ancient or just forgetting how rapidly the pace at which technology accelerates has been increasing of late. How long ago was it that this here "Internet" only had a few hundred nodes?
I am not exaggerating when I say that automatic translation from extremely dissimilar languages requires strong AI. You need to be able to guess what a person is thinking from what they're expressing to map it into a different way of expressing themselves. You also need strong AI to understand the flow of conversation when terms are not expressed strongly.
As an example, Japanese doesn't really have a word that maps to "it." They have a word that maps well to "thing," but nothing that matches "it." This is because pronouns in English fulfill the function of referring back to a concept expressed in a previous sentence to place it in short form in the context of the sentence being expressed.
English Example:
E1: Hey Frank, did you buy that TV yet?
E2: Yeah, I bought it yesterday.
"Japanese" Example:
J1: Hey Hiro, already you that TV did buy? [or still you that TV haven't bought?]
J2: Yeah, yesterday bought. [Note the lack of "I" and "it!"]
Languages like English make translation easy in this regard because you have a generic pronoun to "hold the place" of a specific subject or object. You don't have to know what it is -- you just fill it in. In Japanese, if the conversation were to continue about the TV, the word TV would never be brought up again until the subject of a sentence changed away to something else.
Often, you can have a conversation in Japanese where the subject is never explicitly spoken because it's obvious from the context of the speakers. Given the frequency of homophones in the language (particularly in conjugated forms of verbs), this can make translation maddening if you don't know what the speakers are talking about (because you can't see what they can see or don't know what they know).
This is most frustrating when you're dealing with an author who is using ambiguous or cryptic speech by off-screen characters to give a sense of foreboding or foreshadowing. The conversation is just as cryptic to a native Japanese speaker as it is to us, but we literally cannot translate it to English without knowing the secrets ahead of time because grammatically correct English cannot be that vague!
Anyway, I'm starting to veer off from my original point which is to say that accurate translation requires modeling of the minds of the speaker which requires strong AI. A simple dictionary + grammar rule-set or even a theoretically complete database of possible sentences and phrases will never be able to achieve translation because of the inherent differences in the levels of specificity in the two languages that requires you to model and understand the thoughts and intentions of the speakers.
Frankly I've mostly given up on strong AI within my lifetime after so many decades of empty promises, so I don't see accurate automated translators coming any time soon.
A final thought:
While I've harped on the difficulty of going from Japanese to English, there are some tricky parts of going the other way -- I just don't have as much experience. The one time I wrote a letter in Japanese for a class that included words I didn't know beforehand, I ended up accidentally using words that sounded bizarre and in one case insulting because words in different languages don't map 100% to each other. A word that means the same thing in Japanese and English for one use may not mean the same thing in another. For example, you can use both "karu" and "kiru" to mean "cut" when talking about hair, but you'd use "karu" for mowing grass or shearing sheep, and "kiru" for chopping up fish and accidentally cutting your finger. The relationship between words is a Venn diagram, and computer translation gets that wrong when it's unable to realize what the (omitted) subject or object of the sentence was.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Vegeta, how many copies can we get per toner cartridge?
(Does anyone care to guess?)
we will have seamless translation, as we drive around in our fusion powered flying cars
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I can't imagine this is worlds better than other translation software which is usually fraught with problems due to the different in the structure of the language. People speaking different languages natively don't even conceptualize the same way.
This sounds like an engrish generator....
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
Give me voice transcription that actually works, then start worrying about translating the jabberwocky to another language.
Wildness. Fuji drew up the photocopying machine which automatically translates the document from English from Japanese. That is the clean nut. Whether with respect to appearance, as for the copier the text, as for OCR what kind of section text, you send that to the translation engine, and to the place reset English it can grasp.
Mod parent up. He's completely right. When I read this article, I immediately thought of how easy it would be to do... so I think I'll do it tomorrow just to prove a point.
Step 1: Find OCR engine for various character sets (there's plenty around, and I have a licensed one at work, but I'll try to find a free one)
Step 2: Write code to receive scanned image from copier and pass it to the OCR engine.
Step 3: Pass output of OCR to online translation tool.
Step 4: Read translation from online translation tool.
Step 5: Paste translation back in to correct positions over scanned image (the only part that's even REMOTELY tricky)
Step 6: Submit back as a print job to the copier.
Step 7: Profit! (sorry, had to say it)
I really think this entire thing would take me less than a day to write. I could even add in some fancy stuff like interfacing with the copiers control panel to give fancy options that you can select at the time of scanning (courtesy of the fact that that's my day job)
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
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Its powder level! It's over 9000!
(I tried so hard not to rise to the bait... I honestly did. Then I thought of the power/powder pun and I couldn't stop. Damn you Psykechan! Damn you!
That's the fun part of these automatic translators
Actually, this may not be automatic. Japanese and English are (I understand) two languages which differ on fundamental levels. It's not like trying to get to the station and using Franglais: "poor alley a la gar?" It's totally different. Translation is very, very hard, and words are used differently, too. My last job involved working from a spec written in Japanese, and translated by obviously intelligent Japanese people into English. It was... interesting... work, and involved asking the Tokyo office the same question multiple times in different ways, and then cross-referencing the answers, to see if they were consistent.
Also, one of my favourite Japanese poems reads like this:
"She said she would come
At once, and so I waited
Till the moon rose
In the October dawn"
That's from "One Hundred Poems From the Japanese"; I have a different translation in another book, which comes complete with an explanation of over 100 words (I kid you not) of all the different interpretations of the Japanese original, and why that specific translation was selected. It turns out that the original Japanese is written to be gender-ambiguous, and person-ambiguous. It's not "she" and "I", but something like "unresolved consious being" waiting for "mysterious, gender-ambiguous lover-person about whom I care".
You can see why they settled for a snappier version for the poem translation.
So while I love the meloncholy of the translation, I also feel a bit cheated by the fact that my language won't support the original concept, which sounds even better (when you make up words for those concepts and then replay them in slow-mo in your head).
Also, it makes me very glad not to have to translate instruction manuals or business specs.
'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
Actually, an interesting point from what I wrote above: I spent about 2 months (on and off) trying to work out what the Tokyo office wanted. Many emails, and quite a few phone calls were made. Then we sent out a guy to finish off the code (he'd started it in London, based on what we THOUGHT was required). He had my research and English spec (and his preliminary code) as the basis of what was going to be done, but basically, *he* sorted the final stuff out on the spot, in less than a week. It turned out that a lot of the stuff I thought was wrong, or not *quite* right.
It emerged (and I *never* thought I'd say this, let alone write it) that having a coder on the spot, saying "if we use these rules, you'll get THIS result" turned out to be *more* efficient than getting the spec right beforehand. More accurate, as well.
I simply could *not* nail down an accurate spec for 2 months, because of the problems of translation. The Tokyo guys didn't speak perfect English. I speak no Japanese. We were all intelligent business people; I'm a geek, and a Japanese guy was a geek. We couldn't do it. The only language which worked, at the end of the day, was the logical programming language which spat out results, and the analysis thereof.
When we got to THAT level, the business people could finally say: "change this to Y", or "this value should be X". They had the Japanese technical spec, the system output, and the business knowledge. Only then could we resolve *every* issue.
'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
of wonderful creation Fuji being in hopefully market soon?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Thank you very much for your order for 100.000 bottles of Pocari Sweat.
We will boat this on top of evening in 1000 cases, 10 bottles in each case.
Wishing your family will not die when they hear this news.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
My motherboard manual has a similar segment. Overall it's well-written and seems to be professionally translated, but there's a strange warning relating to some advanced BIOS settings...
"Incorrect using these features may cause your system broken. For power end-user use only."
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
8000, but the english translation will say 9000.