> I need help understanding the feasibility of coding a project in Director > 8.5 that took in text in English and Spanish and first spell checked the > entry fields and then translated those entries into the other language. > > Some fields would be one sentence answers and others would be up to a page > long.
In a word, forget it. Some of the most brilliant minds in computer science and language have been working on translation programs for the past 30 years, and they are still, at best, rudimentary. There's too much ambiguity in language to be handled easily by a computer program. The classic, probably apocryphal, example of failed translation is the story of the computer scientists who fed the sentence "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" into a computer and had it translate it into Russian. Well, they couldn't read Russian, so they had it translate the Russian back into English, and it came back "The vodka is strong, but the meat is rotten." Consider the ambiguity in the sentence "He drove a block and turned into a small restaurant." You know what it means, but how is the computer going to choose between different meanings of "block" and "turned into"? Will the sentence come back "He drove a wooden square and became a small restaurant"? Also, Lingo is slow compared to compiled languages. It would take hours, even days, to translate a page of text half-decently. And that's not counting the years of development you would put into it. Plus, it's really multimedia- oriented, and, as far as I know, no attempt has been made to make it a suitable language for other uses. Find another Lingo project, or find another language to do your translation program. One day computers will translate natural language. Just not now, and probably never with Director. Cordially, Kerry Thompson [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
