In its apologia for its automatic translator Google quoth: http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/faq_translation.html#quality
“Automatic translation is very difficult, as the meaning of words depends on the context in which they're used. While we are working on the problem, it may be some time before anyone can offer human quality translations.” My reply: Well, you can make a start at improving translation outcomes by disambiguating some terms in English. Ambiguity of English terms seems the main source of the Google robot’s serious translation errors. And by “serious translation errors” I mean when translating among all languages, not just language pairs including English, because English is the relay language, through which all pair of languages are funnelled. The following two examples of gross mistranslations committed by the Google translation robot, one from Indonesian into German and the other from Russian into Spanish, are both clearly due to ambiguities in English, not to problems among any of the other languages involved. 1) Indonesian-German BBC article mentions that Barack Obama “left” his Senate seat, using “left” the opposite of “right.” 2) Russian-Spanish BBC article about nationalists demonstration (“march”) in Moscow, which in Spanish came out at as “nationalists in the month of March.” Indonesian: Gubernur Illinois Rod Blagojevich ditangkap dengan tuduhan mencoba menjual kursi senat yang ditinggalkan presiden terpilih Amerika Serikat Barack Obama. German: Illinois Gouverneur Rod Blagojevich verhaftet mit dem angeblichen Versuch verkaufen Senat Sitz, die links den Vereinigten Staaten Präsident Barack Obama. Russian Сотни демонстрантов были задержаны в Москве в ходе несанкционированного марша, которым националисты отметили во вторник День народного единства. Spanish Cientos de manifestantes fueron detenidos en Moscú durante la no autorizada de marzo, dice que los nacionalistas el martes Día de la Unidad. Here the terms are presented in diagram form: TERM 1: Russian: Март Spanish: marz English: (month of) March French: mois de mars Russian: марщ Spanish: marcha English: (protest) march French: marche (de proteste) TERM 2: Indonesian: ditinggalkan: German: verliess: English: left (verb “to leave”) French: abandonna Indonesian: kiri German: links English: left French: (la main) gauche --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Translate" 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?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
