John Seidel wrote:
>
> Go to the www.Altavista.com search engine. It uses the "babelfish"
> translator. Search for German Newspapers. (Actually this translator is
> supposed to work with several languages.) When the list comes up, click on
> the translate button. It is better than nothing...maybe ;-).
>
Maybe. I have filled a good deal of column space with babelfish
translations. Here is a sample, from MicroTimes 176:
> I have great respect for anyone who translates from language to language. "The dangers are many; the pleasures are few." The translations do give a helpful idea of what is being discussed, but the inherent ambiguities mean that no translation is ever exact. Humans try to correct for the meaning drift. Computers do not know how to make this correction, so errors accumulate.
>
> The translations are therefore a form of computer literature. I asked it to interpret the sentence "Who let the fish babble?" into French. The result was
>
> <<Qui ont laissé la rumeur de poissons? >>
>
> Then I had it retranslate the French back into English. I got
>
> "Who left the fish rumour? "
>
> Now I took this retranslation on a round trip into Italian and back. The Italian was "Chi ha lasciato la voce dei pesci?" which was re-englished as "Who has left the voice of the fish?"
>
> After four transitions (from English into French, then into English, then Italian, and back to English), the result "Who has left the voice of the fish?" is only tenuously related to the original "Who let the fish babble?"
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So, let the user beware...
Birrell Walsh
MicroTimes
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