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

Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Posted Jan 5, 2012 12:11 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670)
In reply to: Unfortunately it's not so simple... by khim
Parent article: Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

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.

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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.