There is a saying - the customer is always right. The remarks of Harold (and to some extent Xi Cheng) prove that Google believes the opposite. If you are taught Spanish (I learned French & Latin as a boy, but I am putting this into an American context) you get taught Spanish grammar. You learn the morphology types of -ar -ir -er and you struggle though tenses. The time honoured methods of language teaching are in fact the simplest (the most compressed in Hutter & Legg terms) ways of representing a language.
When I did French I did not know anything about Mossad or the CIA. I could translate without. The fact that country names get changed willy nilly and the fact that hacking, by somebody completely reverses the story in an Arab newspaper are all indications of the fundamental flaws of the system. The reply to those who want to introduce Latin is simply "Palestinium colonus interfecit". Could Google sort out who was killing who by the endings? That was the way we were taught to do it. You insist on calling people idiots who are simply demanding the absence of comic book translations. Quite honestly literal translations might sound odd, but they would be considerably better than what we sometimes get. Surely, to take a case in point, the translations of Deutschland, Vereinige Staten or England are completely unambiguous. No statistics needed. Why are country names changed? There is a whole list of problems. I rather resent the remarks Harold has made. It is YOUR system that is failing - not us. Xi Cheng has said the aim should be to make GT so good that no editing is needed before a translation is published. Alas we are a very long way from that point. I would like to float another question. Google seems to be expressing an interest in MOLTO. This is a grammatical syste, Do Google intend at some point to intoduce a vastly superior system on a subscription basis. - Ian Parker On Aug 25, 9:44 am, Xi Cheng (Google employee) wrote: > First of all, thank you all for your discussion and feedback. > > Fgirl, please be aware of the way Google Translate works is fully > automated by machine, no one is explicitly imposing any rules, the > translation is generated accordingly to the statistical nature of the > corpus we have. Sometimes it contains errors, sometimes we don't have > enough training data, sometimes machine logic needs improvement. > Please don't get insulted, and if it is something seriously wrong, we > will escalate this to the team, and you can always 'contribute a > better translation' and give our system more knowledge about the human > language. > > Harald, thanks for chiming in the thread. Sometimes we could get > people angry or disappointed unintentionally, I think overall you guys > are enthusiastic users, and there's no need to get it to personal > level. > > I have escalate this to the team, and we are looking for improvement > all the time. > > Regards, > Xi > > On Aug 25, 3:56 pm, Fgirl wrote: > > > > > Harald. > > > first of all - you are an idiot. > > actually, that's it. > > and the greatest thing about that word is the fact it's international > > - you won't need any translation to that. > > > וקבל משהו בעברית - תוציא את הראש מהתחת של עצמך ותלמד לקרוא. > > > :) > > > On Aug 24, 8:46 pm, Harald Korneliussen wrote: > > > > If you read their FAQ, you'd learn what statistical translation is, > > > then you wouldn't make such a fool of yourself. > > > > When translating sentences like these from English to Hebrew with no > > > further context, any translator needs to guess at gender. The Google > > > Translator just uses whatever form it has seen most often in the data > > > it is trained on, it has no idea that this gives a politically > > > incorrect result. > > > > Threatening to sue Google for something like this when they give you a > > > free, valuable service is just contemptible. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-translate-general?hl=en.
