I have a website at: www.oh3.net, where I have linked Google translation, so that people may read my four paragraphs found at the site, in their mother tongue (assuming of course, it's among the list). Unfortunately, friends and colleagues of mine whose mother tongues span 29 of Google's list of languages, claim the translation from English to their mother tongue, range from poor grammatically to complete gibberish. Some colleagues also said they could not contact or submit to Google, proper translations for oh3.net.
I have looked over the research papers (mainly coming from IBM research) which Google provides links to, and I suspect that the algorithms likely implemented based on this research are certainly a good start indeed. But, it is clear that the common denominator among all natural languages is not developed or apparently known, by these research groups. I think Google has come to the point at least, where translation by machines is near equivalent to the problem of getting machines to "understand". I applaud Google for starting machine translation on a large scale, but it appears that a great deal must be done before the world will feel comfortable communicating in this fashion. In my opinion (and I'll bet most who would even be reading this post), that the importance of seamless communication via machine translation can not be overstated. I have lived in many places all over the world, and it is absolutely true that we have countless things in common with each other, and thus we should and would be communicating with each other. To that end, machine translation must be near flawless. The other alternative is we all end up using just one language, and that would be a tragedy. --------------------------------ortho-----------------> -- 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.
