Lost in translation: More on the crimes of Google translation

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What's your point?

Translation is an extremely difficult computational problem, because doing it correctly in all situations requires that the system truly understand the meaning of the phrases or sentences that are being translated. Many of the existing automatic translation systems on the web require an extremely large amount of effort by linguists who are fluent in both the source and target language. Because of this, you will notice that most automatic translation services only offer translations between a small number of languages.

Google is trying something different. They are building a model of translation that learns everything, simply by being given pairs of sentences and paragraphs that mean the same thing, but that are written in two different languages. The ultimate goal is to make translation possible between ALL languages in a way that doesn't require an unthinkable amount of special-case work by an extremely large number of very special linguists. (With only 20 languages, there are 20 C 2 = 190 pairs of languages to be translated between. With 50 languages, it's 1225 pairs.)

Check out http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/04/statistical-machine-translation-live.html
to see their official post.

Google should be applauded for this effort. It probably is the only possible way that we will every have good translation between all languages.

Your point seems to be that Google should not advertise translation services unless they are polished and perfect? Do you really think that widespread social prejudices will be formed because people read translations and mistake poor quality for grammatical inability on the part of the foreign authors? I don't.

Finally, as somebody that only speaks two languages, I would be able to make zero sense of any page that was written in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, German, etc, etc. Sure, if I use Google translation, I may not be moved by the eloquence with which the information is conveyed, but nearly every time I have used the service, I have been able to understand the main points of the article. It takes a little more work to read a translated article, but it sure beats trying to read it in a completely foreign language. This is a useful service that has helped me on a number of occasions.

Finally, using machine translation on poetry is a low blow. Look at the official Google research blog post above. They say right there that you're likely to get strange results if you try to translate poetry. Poetry is notoriously symbolic and is very dependent on deeper meanings, analogies, and specific word choices--all things that are nearly impossible for an automated translation service to do correctly. If there was a computer program that could do that reliably, it would be MUCH more useful than just as a machine translation service.

Posted by: marked2end   Posted on: 11/10/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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