Machine Translation
Michael Everson
everson at evertype.com
Fri Sep 11 18:43:12 CEST 2009
On 11 Sep 2009, at 11:13, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> Good dictionaries usually contain several entries for each word in
> the source language; what you do in that case is lookup, not
> translation.
Rendering of one language into another is translation, whether it is a
word or phrase or sentence.
> Short phrases could indeed be the place where machine translation
> has its best chance currently: memory is cheap, phrases can
> eliminate ambiguity, and if they are short, they are suited to
> lookup without much processing.
Yes, currently. And the technology will grow and grow over the next
few hundred years until Star Fleet has its Universal Translator....
>> I have several on my iPhone, and Mac OS
>> ships a Systran widget with its OS X Dashboard. This is machine
>> translation.
>
> Mostly just lookup, isn't it?
No. You can have it process entire sentences.
The red sun was high, the blue low.
-->
Die rote Sonne war hoch, das niedrige Blau.
What do you have in your pocket?
-->
Was haben Sie in Ihrer Tasche?
I assume the first one ought to have read "die niedrige blau", but the
sentence is fairly literary. (It's science fiction.)
There's nothing wrong with the second sentence however.
I still don't see how our subtags, which describe language varieties,
ought to be dragged into this arena. Compare
<lang=de>Was haben Sie in Ihrer Tasche?</lang>
and
<lang=de-machine>Was haben Sie in Ihrer Tasche?</lang>
There is no linguistic difference to be tagged. There was a process
involved in getting to the second of the two sentences, but that is
something else again.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
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