Kenneth Kawamoto wrote: > I don't know where you got it from, but perhaps it's good that you got > dodgy translation because your Japanese text itself is well dodgy (not > in grammatical sense).
I figured there would be a Japanese speaker who would catch that ^_^ I copied and pasted it from a Japanese Web site. It's a little pop-culture poem, kind of impressionistic, and poems don't play by the grammar rules. Perhaps I chose an extreme case to make my point--poems seldom translate well--but the English gibberish it output certainly shows the limits of machine translation. Even though I chose a pop poem, it's from a Japanese Web site, based in Japan, and run by a Japanese company in Japan. I can't vouch for the grammar--I speak Chinese, but not Japanese--but I still stand by my position that machine translation is nowhere near ready for prime time. Perhaps now is a good time to mention that I used to be Engineering Manager for what was then the world's largest localization company, Bowne Global Solutions. You can partially automate the translation process using a program like Trados, but you still need a human native-level speaker to do your translation, not a program. Just a couple of quick examples from Chinese where there isn't one-to-one mapping. In English, we have words for "gate" and "door". In Chinese, they're the same (pronounced "men" in Chinese, "guchi" in Japanese). Chinese also uses one word for the English words "question" and "problem." When I was living in Beijing, my wife (a native Chinese woman who speaks English better than I do--she edits college text books) worked for the PRC's Foreign Languages Press as a "polish editor." That mean, briefly, that they had Chinese translators who translated their books into English, and she translated their English into real English. So, even with human translators who speak English on a fairly high level, you still need that native-speaker eye. And, I know from experience that straight machine translations aren't anywhere near the level of the human translators my wife worked with. Cordially, Kerry Thompson _______________________________________________ Flashcoders mailing list [email protected] http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
