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Article 2532 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
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>From: santas@inf.ethz.ch (Filippos Santas)
Subject: Re: Machine Translation (was re: Searle's response to silicon brain?)
Message-ID: <1992Jan7.205133.6457@neptune.inf.ethz.ch>
Sender: news@neptune.inf.ethz.ch (Mr News)
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Organization: Dept. Informatik, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
References: <2207@ucl-cs.uucp> <1992Jan5.013406.27462@uwm.edu>
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1992 20:51:33 GMT



In article <1992Jan5.013406.27462@uwm.edu> markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins) writes:
>In article <2207@ucl-cs.uucp> G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly) writes:
>>There is no direct translation of the **idea** into English.
>
>Ultimately this is like saying there is no translation of "de facto" into
>English, where it already is a de facto translation of itself into itself.
>
>English is just that kind of language.
>
>Hofstadter once quoted the sentence: "Cette phrase n'a pas traduction en
>Anglais" (which means: "'Cette phrase n'a pas traduction en Anglais' has no
>translation in English") as an example supposedly illustrating the ultimate
>incompatibility of languages.  Obviously the example didn't illustrate the
>point either.

Translate your translation in the same way back to french:
 ['Cette phrase n'a pas traduction en Anglais' has no
 translation in English] n'a pas traduction en Anglais.

It does not resemble very much to the original, does it?

By using the exact references you do not get full meanings.
Try to use exact references to explain the sentence:
"Tomorrow I will go to the country side"
What are you going to use in order to explain "tomorrow"?

Philip Santas

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email: santas@inf.ethz.ch				 Philip Santas
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