thanks for the insight, Harald.
On Aug 24, 4:21 am, Harald Korneliussen wrote:
> 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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