Hi Francis,

Personally, I am always interested in what is not working. Things
working all right are totally uninteresting to me! In fact I have made
several studies on projects that wasn't completed or didn't meet the
expectations. I've learnt a lot from that.

Now, I am very interested in the shortcomings of MT. When I let someone
review a machine translated text they laugh and ridicule it. Once, I was
an agent of a very nice piece of software and suddenly got a copy that
was machine translated to Swedish. My wife never has laughed as much as
when she tried out that program. She laughed until her tears came. She
collapsed on the chair and I wasn't talk-able.

Why put any effort on what's already working? At this time, machine
translation like Google Translate and Bing Translator make fairly good
translations. But they often fail on the same problems. Like pronouns,
for instance. :-) And people laugh at them.

That's why I am looking for better alternatives. The rule based/transfer
systems are for the moment overtaken by the statistical translation
systems, but I believe that might change.

Yours,
Per Tunedal


On Mon, Apr 23, 2012, at 09:31, Francis Tyers wrote:
> El dl 23 de 04 de 2012 a les 10:45 +0200, en/na Per Tunedal va escriure:
> > Hi again Francis,
> > 
> > Pronouns are important in a language. In my French grammars the pronouns
> > have at least 50 % more pages than the verbs. The same applies to my
> > English grammars. All the same, most of the education is spent on verbs.
> > The same applies to translation systems? A great effort on getting the
> > verb conjugations right and leaving the pronouns aside?
> 
> That could be just an indication of what linguists find more interesting
> as opposed to what is educationally more important.
>  
> Also, the relative ease of being exhaustive with pronouns (or any closed
> category), as opposed to verbs (or any other open category).
> 
> > On Sun, Apr 22, 2012, at 18:47, Francis Tyers wrote:
> > 
> > --snip--
> > > 
> > > I think it would be really great if it could be fixed. But in the
> > > meantime, we work with what we've got. Leave the repetitive bit up to
> > > the computer, and leave the human being to work out the hard bit. 
> > 
> > You've got a point. The hard bits are the most interesting. You wouldn't
> > want to take the fun out of translation, would you? :-)
> 
> I think it's a matter of where to put effort, and how much return you
> get on your time invested. You're right that it is probably the most
> linguistically interesting, but in terms of "getting your MT system
> working" interesting, it is lower on the scale.
> 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second.
Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You.
Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE!
http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2
_______________________________________________
Apertium-stuff mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff

Reply via email to