Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 4, 2022 14:38 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin by Wol
Parent article: Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

FWIW, I'd consider handling such ambiguities to be a requirement for translation anyways. Sure, it's not translatable by anything that does "word -> word" translation, but I do think the bar is far higher than that these days.

Of course, you could also be in a strange sci-fi universe where bananas fly and arrows are food for a certain kind of fly (feels kind of Douglas Adams-y to me given the "flooping" of certain mattresses and such). *That* kind of context definitely needs more than just a sentence.

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Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 4, 2022 15:10 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (5 responses)

The funniest part is that, "time flies like an arrow" makes "fruit flies like a banana" easier to translate, because it primes the mind to think of "fly" as a verb.

Whereas without a wider context, "fruit flies like a banana" is ambiguous.

(Bananas, like pigs, fly just fine if you throw them hard enough.)

Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 4, 2022 17:56 UTC (Sat) by hvd (guest, #128680) [Link] (4 responses)

The idea of that sentence is that to parse it correctly, the first "flies" should be parsed as a verb, the second as a noun. It's not meant to be ambiguous, it's meant to be hard to parse. Fruit does not fly as bananas do. That's grammatically correct but makes no sense, fruit does not fly. The verb in the second sentence is "like", as fruit flies are animals that like bananas.

Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 5, 2022 20:58 UTC (Sun) by JoeBuck (guest, #2330) [Link] (3 responses)

Google Translate also has trouble with this sentence:

English to French:

le temps passe comme une flèche, mais les fruits volent comme une banane.

Translating this back to English gives

time flies like an arrow, but fruits fly like a banana.

Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 5, 2022 21:12 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Which throws up another quirk of English - many words (fruit included) either have weird plurals or are number-indefinite. A similar example is sheep.

I'm guessing (like with die/dice, thou/you), the singular has simply fallen into disuse, although I have no clue what the singular might have been for fruit/sheep if that guess is correct.

Cheers,
Wol

Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 6, 2022 16:20 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

I think nouns like fruit and sheep were originally uncountable, like water. That means you'd talk about a quantity of them rather than a number, so there wouldn't really be a singular or plural.

Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Posted Jun 17, 2022 9:59 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

> I think nouns like fruit and sheep were originally uncountable, like water.

Something like that: for sheep at least they were similar in some cases at one time, but that was because of loss of a trailing vowel which *did* indicate a plural, presumably because you could usually figure out the number from contextual clues anyway. The OED says:

> The prehistoric plural *skǣpu normally lost its final vowel in Old English, so that nominative and accusative singular and plural became identical.