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Google's Computing Power Refines Translation
gollum123 sends an excerpt from the NY Times on how Google has taken a lead in language translation, in one of the company's few unqualified successes as it attempts to broaden its offerings beyond search. "...Google's quick rise to the top echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what can happen when Google unleashes its brute-force computing power on complex problems. The network of data centers that it built for Web searches may now be, when lashed together, the world's largest computer. Google is using that machine to push the limits on translation technology. Last month, for example, it said it was working to combine its translation tool with image analysis, allowing a person to, say, take a cellphone photo of a menu in German and get an instant English translation. ...in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts. It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google's alley. ...Google's service is good enough to convey the essence of a news article, and it has become a quick source for translations for millions of people."
English, with Google Translate:
--- ... In the mid-90s, researchers began to favor a so-called statistical methods. They found that if they ate the computer or hundreds of thousands of millions of paragraphs and the translation of humans, it can learn how to make an accurate translation of the new text of speculation. Facts have proved that this technology requires large amounts of data and a lot of computing power, is the right of Google's alley. ... Google's service is sufficient to convey the essence of news articles, it has become a quick translation of millions of people everywhere.
Google's rapid rise to the translation of business executives is a result of what Google released a complex problem, and its powerful computing power for reminding me. The data center, and its Web search, it may be now, when attacked with the network, is the world's largest computer. Google's machine translation technology is being used to push forward the limit. Last month, for example, it indicated that it was a combination of image analysis of the translation tools to enable a person, says that while walking in the German mobile phone menu, photos and immediately the English translation.
---
Okay, perhaps not spectacular... but compared to Babelfish:
--- ...Is anything the prompt possible to occur to the translation business's crown trapezoid's Google quick rise, when Google unties it when the complex question violence computing power. Perhaps the data central network it for the net search establishment now is, when attacks together, world large-scale computer. Google uses that machine to push in the translation technology limit. The previous month, for example, it said that it operates and the image analysis unifies its translation tool, allows the human to adopt a menu the handset picture and obtains one with German immediately English translation. ... in the mid-1990s, researcher started to favor the so-called statistical method. They have discovered that if they have fed the translation which the computer thousands or the tens of thousands of paragraphs and their person cause, its possibly academic society does about what kind of guesses translator accurately the new text. _ it this technology, requests the huge large amount data finally and completely the calculated horsepower, is correct Google the alley. ... The Google service is enough good expresses the news article the essence, and it has become translation quick origin tens of thousands of people
---
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
Last week's The Economist adressed this issue (http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15557431). NY Times recycled it
Yeah, that's actually a pretty good test. Google's version is odd but comprehensible, while Babelfish's is a bunch of ... well ... babble.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Voice to text attempt 1: "What is. Thank you. Hey Faber what I AM slot. People just want to let you know like Hello Colin, this is already the decision. I think it's going to ask." Voice to text attempt 2: " Hi. This is the level Dell Computers, I'm doing a follow, or on the error basement far start up top. If that happens. I still have the problem in 16 Keith dispatch number and I gave you so that into at that back and call us back and we could double shifts order with the problem. Thank you." The first one was silence that got recorded by accident, the second was from our favorite Indian's over at Dell computer, calling to pester me about how my repairs are going. =)
Sure, you might get something decent if you try to translate from English to German, but what about languages with entirely different thought models behind them, like Chinese or Hungarian? Last time I tried using it, it confused "has been" with "Latvian".
What's interesting is that there are a couple of sentences where babelfish is actually better than google and the rest is way off.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
I remember using Altavista's offering back in the day...the results were shoddy at best. It could make anything sound like engrish :p
Living With a Nerd
Well d'uh... that's why it is called babble-fish!
Plus, round-trip translation at least doubles the error compared to an actual application which would involve one-way translation (and probably more, since the "return-trip" translation is starting with a poor quality input). A much more fair test would be comparing a one-way translation, man vs. machine.
For Chinese, just using a character dictionary is better because the translations in Google are so bad. Unfortunately, I must do this on a daily basis. Google is good at search, but cataloging the entire Web is a much easier job than learning Chinese.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
Perhaps the data central network it for the net search establishment now is, when attacks together, world large-scale computer.
Is that thing writing a science fiction novel in it's spare time or something?
I like how it's rooted out Google as the "net search establishment".
Granted that Art is not a field foreign to computing, translation is an art that is difficult to satisfactorily automate. It's not about getting the semantics right, or the meaning right, but to translate a piece of work into another cultural context for another person, is a bit like trying to read somebody's mind. The turing test for translation would probably be something like automatically translating a new contemporary musical into another language? IMHO that's more difficult than getting a computer to write its own musical. I believe there is a niche for automated translation, but even for the niche it's trying to fill, it's not good enough. Not especially in my part of the world where there is not only a diversity of languages, but also a great diversity in the language families from which these language take their characteristics.
Just not now. It still needs a lot of work.
I'm in the translation business, and the general trend in internet communications such as websites, etc. at least, is to simplify the language being used.
For specialized text, we're a long way off yet.
Der Spiegel offers version of some of its stories in English. They aren't direct translations, but quite similar.
Here's part of a story published in english:
And the same story, published in German, translated to English by google:
And babelfish translation of the same story:
I do think the google version is significantly better.
I have a web site where every page is available in English and German. When I tested Google's translation with it, I noticed that Google reliably translated one sentence in the opposite direction, i.e. from English to German when I had asked for a German to English translation: On every page in German, there is one sentence in English which leads to the corresponding page in English. Google's translator appeared to pick the translation right from that page, which of course has that sentence in German (leading to the German version of that page). Google doesn't do this anymore, but when I saw it, I realized that Google's translator did not at all "understand" what it was translating.
An exerpt from the article:
"People change words in their queries. So someone would say, 'pictures of dogs,' and then they'd say, 'pictures of puppies.' So that told us that maybe 'dogs' and 'puppies' were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it's hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance." But there were obstacles. Google's synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I use Google translate frequently, and the translations are not very good, but when you pair it with some basic knowledge of the idiosyncrasies in the Japanese language. I am at least able to get a basic understanding of the text. But in some cases the results are barely any better than the Babble-fish example above.
Having some basic understanding of the Language, I can often divide the text into smaller pieces , which seems to improve quality.
It was the lovely "Google's Computer Might Betters Translation Tool" (since changed in the HTML title to "Using Computing Might, Google Improves Translation Tool" and "Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool" in the online heading):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2169
There's also some commentary about the article from Ben Zimmer at Language Log...
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2170
This doesn't actually mean the translation is any better: all it means is that the Chinese generated by Babelfish is more easily translated back to english, perhaps because it makes even less sense in Chinese. A translation function could be conceived which is a strict, reversible bijection, so that playing this translation game would give you your original English back, word-for-word. Doesn't guarantee that the intermediate Chinese step is in any way comprehensible.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Several others have noted this as well - for Asian languages, Google has a lot of work to do. The Chinese translation near the top is impressive, but while Chinese and Japanese translations are probably pretty good on Google, other Asian languages suffer greatly.
I've been translating a lot of Thai lately, and initially I thought Google was great - the interface is really slick, and it seemed to give a decent result. Passing the translation back through often gave me really weird stuff, but I was expecting that. So it was great, until I tried using it to communicate with someone in Thai - even for really, really basic stuff, often they had absolutely no idea. It was just way off.
While you can feed western languages through it and get great, usable results, for Asian languages besides Chinese and Japanese it's next to useless. I'm guessing there isn't much of an incentive for Google to focus on other Asian languages - for example, in Android 2.1 on the Nexus One there is no way to even install fonts for less-popular Asian scripts like Thai, much less inputting text in those scripts - despite this capability being available on certain other Android phones (you can install it on the Nexus One if you root it, of course).
Based on what their technique for learning translation is, though, hopefully this will improve over time. It's an impressive system as it is, but very much limited to "popular" languages and those very similar to English.
Not to disagree with the results of your test, but I think a better test would be actual translations from authentic Chinese text to English. Going from English to Chinese to English is like taking an English interpretation of what the Chinese are trying to interpret from what someone was saying authentically in English instead of just interpreting into English what someone was authentically saying in Chinese.
That's what I've never understood. Why can't software translate as easily as a human? Is it really that difficult to come up with a set of rules so things are worded correctly?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Eier von Satan correctly - except for Augenballgroße which is essentially Eye-ball-large.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
In Philip K. Dick's obscure 1969 novel Galactic Pot-Healer, the characters play a game based on this very idea. They take common sayings and figures of speech, and feed them through several language-translation computers. The results are then sent to a friend, who attempts to figure out what the original phrase was.
Sometimes when you're reading PKD you get the uncomfortable feeling he really could see into the future.
"No matter where you go, there you probably are." -- Buckaroo Heisenberg
And that's why they called it Babelfish.
"I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street... many days no business come to my hut, but 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 dung."
sic transit gloria mundi
If you are into chess, Google Translate opens up a whole world of chess blogs to you. I haven't used it extensively, but I was quite impressed with this translation.
To the chess players out there, note how it picks up notation interspersed with the text. It's not perfect and seems to fall back into Spanish algebraic in odd places, but I think they are the only translation tool that even tries to do chess notation.
I wonder if there are other "special purpose" translations that Google Translate attempts. It's pretty impressive to me that they even bother with the small chess blog reading public.
Oh, Google Translate does a lot better job on the non-chess parts of blogs, too.
They just need to do what video card manufacturers do to thwart your little test Mr. Man. Cheat in the translation code to recognize your test, and just regurgitate your original text.
Then how would you choose the best translation software to buy???? Oh... it's free?
Obligatory Chinese Room mention.
If a translation engine grows strong enough to adequately translate the phrases "give us our daily bread," "sharks are predatory carnivores," and "the loan shark wants his bread," that implies a significant ability to contextually infer meaning. Could someone opine on (or point to a work exploring) how similar the task of building an accurate translator is to the task of building a competent, world-aware (if perhaps not absolutely Turing-quality) AI?
Google can now track what I order for dinner. I feel so naked.
A huge surveillance infrastrure that can be used to monitor conversations in real time as they can be converted to text and searched for inference.
That's a whole lot better than it was a few years ago.
They still need to work on their Japanese a good bit, though. Translating my first sentence from English to Japanese to English spit out:
This is the way it is much more than a few years ago the entire
.
I believe they are getting very strong on the vocabulary and context clues bit but having a difficult time translating between different Subject-Object-Verb formats.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I don't think so. Things get lost in translation with humans already. There are phrases I simply can't translate in languages I'm fluent in, idioms and the like. And when humans pass along information, it also gets distorted, simplified, and the like - language is a vague, flexible thing. So we're trying to give the machine a test impossible to pass, a Turing test where most of us don't even have any real experience how well a human would do it as a frame of reference.
It would be better just to translate many pieces one time, both ways, and have a fluent bilingual judge the quality. Although, I agree, checking the Chinese/Japanese to English capability is a good test.
My personal test was to take reviews off of amazon.co.jp and translate them and see how the translator fared. Babelfish is indeed a bunch of babble, while Google's translation is far from perfect (or even all that good), it's obviously better.
A translation function could be conceived which is a strict, reversible bijection, so that playing this translation game would give you your original English back, word-for-word.
That's the main problem with translations: they're not strict, and sometimes not even reversible. In every language there are common phrases which make perfect sense to someone thinking in the language, but are untranslatable to the point where you as a translator just rephrase the whole sentence (example: "is right up Google's alley"). Then, if you get another translator to translate it back to the original language, you sure as hell won't get the original phrase back (assuming both translations are perfect in terms of understandability and conveying the message).
Then you have words that don't exist in the target language, like "brute-force" or "computing horsepower", or even concepts that don't exist.
I think the fact that we can understand machine translations is more a tribute to the error correction mechanisms in our brain than anything else.
I often find the English to/from Chinese translations is usually better than English to/from Japanese. Chinese characters have concise meanings vs. Japanese's character set which are based on sounds.
I have found in for Malay-English translations, that initially, Googles translation was better than Dewan Pustaka Dan Bahasa (DPDB) ie the people in charge of developing the Malay language. Since then however, I have found more errors creeping into their translations. I wonder if somebody is poisoning the well because when I first used Google translate the 99% of the translations were accurate, and the 1% was an unknown word. In my last use of Google translate, 50% of the words were wrong (as opposed to being unknown).
Exhibit A: http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html
..In every language there are common phrases which make perfect sense to someone thinking in the language, but are untranslatable to the point where you as a translator just rephrase the whole sentence (example: "is right up Google's alley"). Then, if you get another translator to translate it back to the original language, you sure as hell won't get the original phrase back (assuming both translations are perfect in terms of understandability and conveying the message).
Then you have words that don't exist in the target language, like "brute-force" or "computing horsepower", or even concepts that don't exist.
I think the fact that we can understand machine translations is more a tribute to the error correction mechanisms in our brain than anything else.
Awl hour translate spume waffle. Ewe no other gender knot exchangeable!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Japanese is very unique in that it leaves out the subject, and sometimes object of a clause when the meaning is understood in context. This is, however, very frustrating for machine translators. In addition, Japanese has a topic for its sentences, which function is very ambiguous in an English language.
Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space... but Jimmy has fancy plans, and pants to match!
Feel my scales donkey donkey donkey donkey donkey.
Also...
I stole a car! I mean, a sycamore tree...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I think this should become a new internet meme. Everytime anyone says anything about a new technology, just post a response that says "that reminds me of what Phillip K. Dick wrote about in his obscure short story / novel [madeUpName]"
this is what is dimensional analysis for physic:
given the maximum password length, determine the computing power of the provider:
example gmail.com, hotmail.com and others
tips: hashtables
in one of the company's few unqualified successes
What does that mean? Google has had more successes in the online world than most of its competitors.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
While this works well for the more widely-spoken languages (Western/European Languages, Chinese, Japanese), I suspect there is a massive drop-off for some of the less common languages, especially those for languages spoken in countries less connected to the internet. The article mentioned they feed the algorithm human translations from the EU and UN proceedings; what about less-common Asian languages, the Indian subcontinent languages, central Asian languages? The volume simply doesn't exist. :(
Where the volume does exist, what about Russian and Korean, which are dominated by Yandex and Naver? Might be interesting to run a comparison, but unfortunately all the languages I speak are covered fairly well by Google at this point
Try iSnapit on your iPhone or Android, and you can translate everything you see with a single click - and much more.
I am definitely down with that meme. Ironically on a totally unrelated story, i just borrowed a book from my friend by P.K.D. talking about obscure authors suddenly finding themselves idolized superstars on par with the biggest Sports players or Rockstars. and their lives dealing with papparozzi - huh
Google translate English>traditional Chinese>simplified Chinese> Italian >back to English from what i copied from my above post: I believe that with the Mei-Mei. Ironically, the story is completely independent, I just borrow a book from my friend from polycystic kidney disease, clear speech, suddenly found itself the greatest athletes in the worship of the stars or Rockstars. Their lives and to deal with mosquitoes - ah
The translator can't seem to figure out exactly how many times the road has diverged...
"two roads diverged in a yellow wood"
http://translationparty.com/#6827987
Now that they turned on automatic sub-titles for many youtube videos, how long until these subtitles can be read in any language?
And how long until they are synchronized by a synthetic voice in any language?
The translator can't seem to figure out how many times the road has diverged...
two roads diverged in a yellow wood"
But translation isn't easy for humans, so there's no reason to expect it should be easy for computers.
Translating from one language to another, for a human translator, basically comes down to this:
But the problem is that there is never unique "equivalent" text in the target language, but rather, a lot of alternatives that make different tradeoffs. This is because a foreign language is part of a foreign culture that has many concepts that are foreign to the source language, and likewise, the source language is part of a source culture that is foreign to the target language. So translators repeatedly find themselves in situations where either they must leave out something that the source text says or implies, or else say something unnatural in the target language to convey that information.
Comparing the grammar of dramatically different languages makes this really clear. For example, many languages have grammatical evidentiality, where statements are subject to grammatical rules that depend on the source of the speaker's information for the statement. So for example, a language where the equivalent to the sentence "Joe kicked Tom" required the verb to be conjugated differently depending on whether the speaker saw Joe kick Tom or heard so. If you had to translate an English text to a language like that, you'd have to decide, for each clause in the English text, who is the speaker of the sentence, and whether they know the event first-hand or second-hand, and either of those may often be unclear from the English text.
In the converse case, imagine if we're translating from a language like that into English. Then every sentence in the source language encodes some claim about how the speaker knows the information conveyed in that sentence. A completely literal translation, in which every English sentence had that information, would be extremely unnatural English writing. Leaving it out of every single sentence, on the other hand, might leave out something important to understand the text in some cases. So the translator has to decide in which cases the evidential conjugations of the source language must be translated into a longer English sentence than otherwise necessary.
This is one extreme example, but this sort of problem occurs at every level in translation. Translators often find themselves adding in information that the source text doesn't say, having to use circumlocutions in the target language to express really simple things from the source language, leaving out information from the source text has because it would be too cumbersome to phrase it in the target language, adopting strange conventions in the target language, or having to write supplementary materials to help the readers understand the translation (footnotes, introductions).
Or in a few cases, the translators write for people who don't know the source language but are familiar with some of the customs and concepts, or willing to learn them to understand the translation, and then they just leave untranslated words in. (Examples: lots of philosophy translations from German or French; anime fansubs that leave Japanese honorifics like -san or -sempai in, because the people who use them are anime fans, are at least a bit familiar with them, and actually understand more nuances that way.)
So, translation is not a mechanical task, and thus, there can't be a simple set of rules to do it. It's, as I said at the top, understanding a text in the source language, and writing another in the target language, tailored toward a different audience. And it requires understanding the audiences of the original text and the translation, and making many informal decisions based on that.
Are you adequate?
I guess what Google is talking about must be something different because Nokia had s/w for the N95 that could take a picture of a Chinese menu and provide a translation in English.
Max.
Wasn't Skynet used for translation
before it decided for a better future for humanity ?
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Its an easy, or perhaps entertaining test, not good test.
I recently did an evaluation for a translation agency on the state of current machine translation services. Since I translate Japanese to English for a living, that was the pair I was testing.
Long story short, of the five services I tried that do Japanese-English MT, Google came out the worst. Yes, the worst. Mind you, all of them were terrible. None could produce grammatical English sentences, and most couldn't even translate basic things like Japanese dates properly.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Lately I've been trying out using Google Translate to improve my German. Whenever I write a sentence that I'm not too sure about, I take my English version of it and translate it into German in Google to see how it compares. So far it's been useful in better understanding preposition usage and sentence structure. That is, if it's reliable enough.
It's not called Babblefish without a reason.
To be fair, your first post was just barely in English.
She wrote m back and commended me on keeping up with the language. Since I used Google Translate, I guess they do a decent job of it.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
then Google Translate (or for some things wordreference.com) are fantastic resources. I don't mind that large chunks of text get translated in a stilted way - if you just need to get the meaning of a short phrase then Google is so much faster and easier than a paper dictionary.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
of course statistical translations look better, because they optimise
exactly that: frequent word sequences in the target language (and related to
the input of course).
the real question is how well do they match the input meaning.
can you tell ?
I think this benchmark puts the bar a bit too high. First of all, a translator is not designed to produce invertible translations. Moreover, as the goal is to produce an understandable translation of a human-written text, the artifacts introduced by the machine-created translation are most probably magnified quite a bit with the second round of translation. Still, it's interesting to see that the Google algorithms actually do an OK job even in such an artificial benchmark.
I'm doing a language study,
And i have to say, Google translation is the worst of any free web translation sites.
Why are they so proud on such a poor translator ??
Most people who speak more then one language find it to be funny how Google translates.
I think for a start its good, has many languages available, now next work on the translation part.
Improvements required on spanish french dutch german and chineese.. and i gues some more, like scandinavian etc.
Babelfish has a different origin (started as free to everyone) but became later comercial (thanks to all who helped translating).
I wouldnt even consider using babelfish these days.. there are much better sites.
There are 2 core problems with translating:
1. Language requires a cultural frame of reference.
You can see this in understanding humor in different societies. For example Monty Python is a product of a British perspective. The English language, as spoken in England, only works when you understand the culture behind it. For example, "daily bread" only works in western languages because of the shared Christian influence. In Japanese, for example, "daily rice" might bring up a similar understanding that "daily bread" doesn't carry.
2. Language is a moving target.
References keep changing, and a computer (or even a foreign-based translator) has a hard time keeping up. Think about what Tea Party meant just 5 years ago, as opposed to today.
All this means that you're going to get a really good computer translator about the time you get a really good computer painter. Even the best of the given translations in the responses to this story aren't anything someone would want to publish as an example of good English usage - the only benefit is a moderate ability to get the point of the subject.
Or to drive the point home, try passing Goethe through the translator and see if the English is as good as the German.
That's the true test of a translator - can it retain excellence, beyond base meaning?
example: ..... Er wird es in sein Schuldbuch schreiben und dir nicht lange im Gebet bleiben.
Wenn ein Edler gegen dich fehlt, so tu als hättest dus nicht gezählt!
becomes ..... He will write it in his book of guilt and you do not stay long in prayer.
When the gentleman wanting against you, then do as you would not have counted's!
Sure you get the idea, but the artistry is pure fail.
...knot...
I don't know of any text-to-text translation programs that mix up homophones.
English is not "descended from French," period. It has a large proportion of vocabulary from French. To you that may sound like it makes it "descended from French," but as it turns out, that's simply irrelevant to language classification, and precisely for the reason you state as (b): languages borrow from others very easily.
English has a relatively recent common ancestor with German, called Proto-Germanic, and a much more distant one with French, called Proto-Indo-European. To show the link to German, however, you must compare English and German words that come from Proto-Germanic. English words that come from French are noise in this comparison.
In addition, the fact that idioms are shared between English and French isn't particularly because English speakers borrowed the idioms from French. It's more because English and French are both European languages whose speakers have a long history of cultural exchange, a history that actually goes further back than the languages themselves. There are a lot of idioms that are common to both languages because they both got them from a third source. The big common sources are the Greco-Roman classics, the Bible, Christianity. Also, every major work of prose from most West European countries since the Renaissance has been translated to the languages of the others and read extensively, so that yes, "I think, therefore I am" is as much of a stock phrase as "être ou ne pas être, telle est la question" is one in French.
Are you adequate?
Keep in mind that the translation algo is most suited for regular grammar. Not the gobbledeegook it outputs. Grammar -> Chinese gobbledeegook -> English gobbledeegook is a pretty decent translation.
I don't believe an entirely stochastic approach is the solution to the problem of correctly translating text between languages. Sure, Google does well at translating Spanish to English, but its translation from Russian to English is god-awful, and its translation of Kafka from German to English is lacking. The problem with stochastic is that it often neglects to include grammatical or morphological rules. The Russian translation example really brings this to light, as it translates perfective words poorly: "pokoncheno" (has ended) as "to end", and "ostonovleno" as "stopped" (rather than "has stopped").
This one is fun:
What is the word with most meanings?
What words have any meaning?
What is the meaning of the word?
What is the meaning of a word you do?
Meaning of words is what to do or what?
What is the meaning of words can do something?
Mean I can make any kind of words?
I can be what the average of the word?
Average word what I can?
Average words What can I do?
Average words I can do?
What words do I average?
What I mean is average?
What is the average that I mean?
What is the average of that mean?
What do you mean average?
I mean what I mean?
What do you mean what I mean?
I mean what you mean why?
What do you mean I mean why?
What do you mean mean why?
What you mean why?
How do you mean why?
I mean why is that?
What I mean why?
How do you mean why?
It is doubtful that this phrase will ever reach equilibrium.
Where do you think "All your base are belong to us" came from?
Fucking a fat girl is like riding a scooter... it's fun 'til someone sees you.
This doesn't actually mean the translation is any better: all it means is that the Chinese generated by Babelfish is more easily translated back to english, perhaps because it makes even less sense in Chinese. A translation function could be conceived which is a strict, reversible bijection, so that playing this translation game would give you your original English back, word-for-word. Doesn't guarantee that the intermediate Chinese step is in any way comprehensible.
I thought your post was really interesting so I tried it myself. The following is the Spanish translation, with the bits that are off or don't make sense in italics and the way I would translate it in bold. The bits in bold parenthesis are omissions from the original translation...
"...(el) Rápido ascenso de Google para a los escalones superiores de la traducción es un recordatorio de lo que puede suceder cuando Google libera su potencia de cálculo bruta vigor a contra/sobre problemas complejos. La red de centros de datos que se construyó para búsquedas en la Web puede ser ahora, anclados al suelo juntos conjuntamente, (el) equipo más grande del mundo. Google está utilizando la máquina para empujar los límites de la tecnología de traducción.
Feeding it back it's own translation:
"... Google's rapid rise to the upper echelons of the translation is a reminder of what can happen when Google releases its brute force computing power to complex problems.'s Network data center that was built to search the web may be now, when lashed together, the world's largest computer. Google is using the machine to push the limits of translation technology
Feeding it mine (removing the italics text and adding the bold)
"... Google's rapid rise to the upper echelons of the translation is a reminder of what can happen when Google released its raw computing power against complex problems. The network of data centers that was built to search the web can now, together, (be)the world's largest computer. Google is using the machine to push the limits of translation technology.
Either is way better than what comes out of Babblefish by a mile
+Raider of the lost BBS
What's especially good is when it has Japanese words for the translation from English, but it doesn't have an English translation for those same words- so you get a random chunk of Romanji in the middle of an otherwise normal gibberish Engrish sentence.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Good times.
"But sometimes, there's a man – and I'm talking about the Dude here – sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude. In Los Angeles."
"But sometimes, man - you can go anywhere - even in some cases, men, men of his time and place. He is the right fit. Order. In Los Angeles."
Wah!