Unfortunately it's not so simple... [LWN.net]

Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Posted Jan 4, 2012 21:38 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions) by job
Parent article: Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

In order to get a feeling what Translate produces, try using it on closed loop of languages (ie. going back to your native) and see.

This is deeply flawed idea.

That's roughly what you intend to send.

Not really. Every translation loses piece of original. No matter who does it. After few translations you can get entirely different text. If you are doing machine translation then it'll lose some of the original meaning and get some random noise instead. If it's human translation then it'll keep about the same amount of original but the rest will not be a random nose - it'll include personality of people who did the translation.

The great example is the tale of "Ein Gleiches" which was translated in 1902 to Japanese, then in 1911 to French and then shortly after that back to German.

Original:
Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh'
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest Du auch.

Tranlation of translation of translation:
Stille ist im Pavillon aus Jade
Krähen fliegen stumm
Zu beschneiten Kirschbäumen im Mondlicht.
Ich sitze
Und weine.

The very fact that the last German translator had no idea that he's back-translating quite famous work of Goethe should say you something...

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Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Posted Jan 5, 2012 12:11 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (2 responses)

Asbolutely, the perfect translation does not exist unless the target language is a pure transcription of the source. But those theoretical exercises are far from what Google Translate produces, which is often unparseable to a native speaker and you would be hard pressed to even guess at the intent of the original text.

A reasonably intelligent human with a dictionary fares much better. Your German example, while being a clear example of the difficulties involved, is still parseble in the end.

Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Posted Jan 8, 2012 20:52 UTC (Sun) by csawtell (guest, #986) [Link] (1 responses)

I can't agree with the above with reference to Google Translate in Spanish to English translations. My experience is that the English result is perfectly readable. My immediate reaction was "Goodness me, this seems to actually work". From time to time, the result might be a bit stilted, but still perfectly readable and understandable. I was very surprised.

Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Posted Jan 9, 2012 20:29 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

I get the impression that machine translation is still one of those cases where the results are highly variable. It's better when languages are more closely related and where they've put more effort into manually tuning the results. So a pair of reasonably closely related languages that get translated between a lot, like English and Spanish, are likely to produce much better results than two languages from different language groups, like English and Japanese, or a rarely translated pair, like Scots and Faroese.