Comments on: [Documentation] How Machine Translation Does its Magic

By: El Oso » Archive » Fidelis Morfaw of the WHO: Translating Health Information

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:39:46 +0000

[...] my interest in how the internet can facilitate and speed up the translation workflow, I was fascinated to hear [...]

By: Prentiss Riddle

Prentiss Riddle — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 15:23:40 +0000

Thanks for the reply, Francis. You’re probably right that the quality is better when translating among closely related languages. But that raises the question of whether automatic translation is necessary among closely related languages. Slang and regional differences aside (which automatic translators usually can’t deal with anyway), aren’t closely related languages in their written, literary-standard form often mutually intelligible without assistance?

Admittedly I may be biased by the languages I have the most exposure to — phonology is about the only thing that keeps Spanish, Italian and Portuguese speakers from understanding each other. Perhaps within other language families there are gaps which stymie humans but are easily bridged by software.

By: Francis Tyers

Francis Tyers — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 23:07:30 +0000

“I’m looking forward to your post on why machine translation is important. Personally, I consider it dangerous in the hands of the lingustically naive — it almost always does a poor job and often does such a spectacularly bad job”

I encourage you to look into the quality of machine translation output when translating between closely-related languages. It is understandable that the issues surrounding this would not be widely known as in the anglophone world we don’t really have any languages which are closely related (Scots could qualify but there is no really accepted standard).

A quick note on the post: The section on SMT isn’t quite how I explained it, but that is probably down to a problem of my communicating the process rather than David’s scribing. For people who are interested in how SMT works, I would encourage them to look at the Wikipedia page on ‘Statistical machine translation’.

By: Prentiss Riddle

Prentiss Riddle — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 12:46:00 +0000

I’m looking forward to your post on why machine translation is important. Personally, I consider it dangerous in the hands of the lingustically naive — it almost always does a poor job and often does such a spectacularly bad job that unless someone views every word with a high degree of skepticism and is prepared to reverse-engineer the translation glitches, it can do more harm than good.

That said, I have to admit I use it often, and I’ve grudgingly come to enjoy machine translation in some social software situations – for example, when someone turns on a translation bot in Second Life, which has the value of illustrating to everyone in the space how bad translation software is!

By: ruth

ruth — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 08:50:00 +0000

Keep writing; I’m reading.