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Article 2436 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: todd@ceres.elcom.nitech.ac.jp (Todd Law)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Machine Translation (was re: Searle's response to silicon brain?)
Message-ID: <TODD.91Dec30191905@ceres.elcom.nitech.ac.jp>
Date: 30 Dec 91 10:19:10 GMT
References: <40822@dime.cs.umass.edu> <1991Dec18.172040.3506@spss.com>
	<45303@mimsy.umd.edu> <1991Dec21.000014.6836@husc3.harvard.edu>
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In-reply-to: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu's message of 21 Dec 91 05:00:13 GMT


In article <1991Dec21.000014.6836@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

>>Simple.  Correct translation is a matter of finding an approximate synonym;
>>synonymy is a semantic relation; if machines can't compute semantic


Obviously, the writer has never tried to write a machine translation
program, especially for distant languages such as English and Japanese.

Perhaps for German & English, you can write some rules, make a nice
dictionary, and presto, you get output that, although not natural,
makes some sense.

Not so for Japanese.  The structure of the language is so completely
different from western languages that the above approach would produce
meaningless results.  You could barely make out what a piece is about
let alone understand the meaning.  You have to translate not only
syntax, not only semantics, but CULTURE.  Semantics are only the
tip of the cultural iceberg.


Todd in Japan



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