Hi edd, Great question. Unfortunately the answer is likely "we don't", that is, we don't handle the variants of Armenian. For many languages we support, there can be several variants, unfortunately the difficulty for us is often that it is difficult to tell the difference between documents written in the different variants in an automatic way. This makes it difficult for us to collect training data for our system that can separate out all the variants. It is also likely that even if we could tell the difference between the variants, that some variants we simply would not find enough data to do anything effective with.
The result is we likely find documents of all three variants of Armenian and we train our system on all of them – which probably results in a system dominated by which ever variant has the most content published on the web. Hope that helps your understanding, and my apologies that we cannot more easily provide a way to more effectively handle these variants. If you're interested in more information, check out http://translate.google.com/about/, which has a nice description of how our system works. Best, Josh Estelle Senior Software Engineer Google Translate On Dec 20, 6:43 am, edd wrote: > Hello, > I am delighted Google Translate has introduced support for Armenian. > However considering there are three "variants" of Armenian - Classical > Armenian, Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian - how do you handle > this "three in one" situation? Some words that are present in one > variant are unknown or have different meaning in the other > variant(s). > Classical Armenian is the written language of the Bible, the church > and the classical literature. > Eastern Armenian is the language of the Republic of Armenia. > Western Armenian is the language of the large Armenian Diaspora. > To complicate matters further Eastern Armenian can be written using > the classical or the modern orthography. > So my question is how do you handle all this in Google Translate under > the single language code ("hy")? -- 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.
