Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: Philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk (Philip Hugh Hunt)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!MathWorks.Com!solaris.cc.vt.edu!news.duke.edu!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!demon!storcomp.demon.co.uk!Philip
Subject: Re: Machine Translation
References: <5+2VgIb.padrote@delphi.com>
Organization: Storage Computers Ltd
Reply-To: philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk
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Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 01:29:58 +0000
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In article <5+2VgIb.padrote@delphi.com> padrote@delphi.com "John" writes:
> Recently someone posted a rather harsh assessment of computer 
> translation programs. I bought one of these programs, called 
> "Spanish Scholar for Windows". It is useful to me as an on-line 
> dictionary and thesaurus, but its automatic translation capabilities 
> leave much to be desired.
> 
>    In the same spirit, I decided to take a passage from a well-known 
> book (in English) and translate it first into Spanish, then back 
> into English, using the Spanish Scholar program. Here is the result:
> 
>    Mister was reduced to see the city and her toast that the
>    men had constructed. Then Mister said: "If now, while they
>    is one to populate, talking everything language the same,
>    they have pulled out to do east, nothing the stop of doing
>    from where whichever they supposing to do. That let's
>    descend and there we confuse his language, in order that
>    one will not understand what another say." I grasped Mister
>    scattered them from where there everywhere the earth globe,
>    and they stopped of constructing the city. That be why it
>    is named Babel, well there Mister confused the speech of
>    all the world.
> 
> You may 
> judge for yourselves whether this program is worthwhile for everyday 
> use.

I think you might be being too harsh on the program: every time it 
translates, it mangles the meaning. But you're making it mangle the 
meaning *twice*, so the result is *twice* as bad as its usual translation
quality. A fairer test would be to translate from a modern Spanish version
of the Bible.

It's reasonable that the program get mixed up on shades of meaning; but
less reasonable are grammatical errors like "they is" or "That be". It
ought to be quite simple for the programmers to fix this sort of mistake.


-- 
*** Phil Hunt *** philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk ***
