Ha ha that's very interesting. I asked in another post if Google
Translate internally uses some kind of "deep structure" representation
of language, as proposed by Chomsky. It sounds like it does, and its
"deep structure" for language is.... English! :)
This translation "via English" might also explain why Google Translate
mangles grammar so badly, and can't understand grammar-based
distinctions very well.
You can see practical reasons why using English as the reference
language would be a good idea. For any given language, people who can
translate it into and out of English are probably the most numerous.
But on linguistic grounds, English is a poor choice. Although it has a
large vocabulary, it has a relatively high proportion of homonyms.
Being more or less a pidgin language, it has extremely unsophisticated
grammar, so grammar is not much help to resolve unclear cases.
Presumably Google uses statistical techniques, and its massive corpus,
to resolve unclear cases. But from the evidence of bad Google
Translations, it does not look like the statistical rules used by
Google understand that there is not a direct 1:1 syntactical
relationship between all languages, or between all languages and
English.
On May 5, 10:42 pm, Fishbait22 wrote:
> I know nothing about Google Translate, but I have it on my iGoogle
> page, and I suddenly wondered what was the Hebrew word for "lead" (the
> metal.) Unsurprisingly the program thought I meant "lead' (the verb)
> and gave me a fair Hebrew equivalent, 'l'hovil." (I would translate
> this "transport," but close enough.)
>
> I figured I could avoid the ambiguity by going from Spanish ("plomo")
> to Hebrew. Unbelievably, Google Translate once again gave "l'hovil"--
> a translation for the Hebrew verb "lead."
>
> From this I conclude that the program does not actually translate from
> Spanish to Hebrew, but from Spanish to English to Hebrew, thus
> translating an unambiguous Spanish noun into a verb! This is bizarre
> and awful. . . .
>
> I'm sure I'm millionth person to discover this, but really!
>
> Comments?
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