On Aug 15, 7:41 pm, z0ltan wrote:
> I tried translating "Silver Stone" from English into German and it
> does not work. It translated the same to French as "Pierre d'Argent"
> which I tried to convert from French to German but it is still
> rendered as "Silver Stone".
>
> Any idea why this is the behavior?
It depends on context. If a human translator, for instance,
encountered the word "Silver Surfer", he would need to
1. Recognize that it is the name of a Marvel comics superhero. This
could be very difficult depending on the context and the background of
the translator.
2. Decide whether to use a literal translation ("Sølvsurferen" in
Norwegian) leave it untranslated (as many superhero names are today)
or find the correct non-literal translation (as most superhero names
were translated in the past. I think Silver Surfer was called "Lynet",
literally "Lightning", in Norwegian.
So it's not easy for a human translator either. I don't know exactly
how Google Translate works, but I have observed that it tries to "do
the right thing". It can translate names of films, books and
characters correctly even when the translation is far from literal.
(Try translating "Shawshank Redemption" from English to German, for
instance).
I would guess that when the translator gets "Silver Stone" with no
context, it "thinks" that it is some sort of name, due to the capital
letter in "Stone". Depending on whether it's seen that name in its
training corpus, it figures out whether to translate it literally or
leave it untranslated. For German, it apparently decided to do the
latter, the former for French. It could also come up with some
creative non-literal or halfway translation, but it didn't this time
(try "Susi und Strolchi" from German to English for an example of
that).
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