On Friday 19 April 2013, Whistler, Ken <[email protected]> wrote:
> You are aware of Google Translate, for example, right?
Yes. I use it from time to time, mostly to translate into English: it is very
helpful.
> If you input sentences such as those in your scenarios or the other examples,
> such as:
> Where can I buy a vegetarian meal with no gluten-containing ingredients in it
> please?
> You can get immediately serviceable and understandable translations in dozens
> of languages. For example:
> Wo kann ich ein vegetarisches Essen ohne Gluten-haltigen Bestandteile davon,
> bitte?
> Not perfect, perhaps, but perfectly comprehensible. And the application will
> even do a very decent job of text to speech for you.
I am not a linguist and I know literally almost no German, so I am not able to
assess the translation quality of sentences. Perhaps someone on this list who
is a native speaker of German might comment please.
I am thinking that the fact that I am not a linguist and that I am implicitly
seeking the precision of mathematics and seeking provenance of a translation is
perhaps the explanation of why I am thinking that localizable sentences is the
way forward. There seems to a fundamental mismatch deep in human culture of the
way that mathematics works precisely yet that translation often conveys an
impression of meaning that is not congruently exact. Perhaps that is a factor
in all of this.
Thank you for your reply and for taking the time to look through the
simulations and for commenting.
Having read what you have written and having thought about it for a while I am
wondering whether it would be a good idea for there to be a list of numbered
preset sentences that are an international standard and then if Google chose to
front end Google Translate with precise translations of that list of sentences
made by professional linguists who are native speakers, then there could be a
system that can produce a translation that is precise for the sentences that
are on the list and machine translated for everything else.
Maybe there could then just be two special Unicode characters, one to indicate
that the number of a preset sentence is to follow and one to indicate that the
number has finished.
In that way, text and localizable sentences could still be intermixed in a
plain text message. For me, the concept of being able to mix text and
localizable sentences in a plain text message is important. Having two special
characters of international standard provenance for denoting a localizable
sentence markup bubble unambiguously in a plain text document could provide an
exact platform. If a software package that can handle automated localization
were active then it could replace the sequence with the text of the sentence
localized into the local language: otherwise the open localizable sentence
bubble symbol, some digits and the close localizable sentence bubble symbol
would be displayed.
If that were the case then there might well not be symbols for the sentences,
yet the precise conveying of messages as envisaged in the simulations would
still be achievable.
Perhaps that is the way forward for some aspects of communication through the
language barrier.
Another possibility would be to have just a few localizable sentences with
symbols as individual characters and to have quite a lot of numbered sentences
using a localizable sentence markup bubble and then everything else by machine
translation.
I shall try to think some more about this.
> At any rate, if Margaret Gattenford and her niece are still stuck at their
> hotel and the snow is blocking the railway line, my suggestion would be that
> Margaret whip out her mobile phone. And if she doesn't have one, perhaps her
> niece will lend hers to Margaret.
Well, they were still staying at the hotel were some time ago.
They feature in locse027_simulation_five.pdf available from the following post.
http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?p=16378#p16378
They also feature in the following document available from the forum post
listed below it.
a_simulation_about_an_idea_that_would_use_qr_codes.pdf
http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?p=16692#p16692
That idea is not about localizable sentences, yet I found that being able to
use the continuing characters and the scenario from the previous simulations
was helpful in the creative writing of that simulation.
William Overington
20 April 2013
