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Has anyone tried Google Translator yet? It is astounding. (translate.google.com)
I just sent "Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow" from English to French to Azerbaijani to Lao to Czech and back to English, and it came back exactly the same, except somewhere along the way, the proper name Mary got translated to a cognate, so I wound up with "Asked a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow." Furthermore, for most languages, you can click the Listen icon, and hear the text read back to you with correct phonetics, but the intonation is a little bit choppy.
It still has some rough edges, some some languages don't have talkback voice yet, and some are very poor (e.g. Catalan), but most are very good.
The true test of a translation is whether a joke can go through several languages. I entered this one in the machine:
A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.” The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves. “What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!” Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?” The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!”
After going through Greek, Malay, Japanese, and Finnish, it came back like this:
"Please have a look at the same time to prove it to you. This is crazy children of the world." I, on the other hand, the young son of a barber come barber and barber whispers to his customer, put a dollar bill in the other two quarters, said panggilanbudak more than that, "boy, what are you? Want 'son took quarters and leaves. "I do not? Do not you tell me," said the scissors. Later, when the customer is away, the boys look like the same ice cream shop, he said, "he has never learned." "Hello, I would like to ask you, why you never take dollars instead of quarters? Children," the boy licking a cone replied that day, "so I take the dollar game, it's over!"
Thank you for pointing this one out. I've never used it, or at least not since it has become so sophisticated. I entered the sentence, "Hello. I want to go to the apartment and to the store, please." (simple, so I could verify in the languages I sort of know, but I'm not completely comfortable with)
I only translated it to languages that I either know or am familiar enough with to know whether the translation was accurate: Spanish, French, Esperanto, Norwegian, and Irish Gaelic.
In Spanish, it was spot on.
In French it was spot on, except oddly, it would alternate between two words for "store": magasin, and boutique, depending on whether the "please" was included at the end (which is okay, I guess, but kind of strange).
Esperanto, Perfect. (of course, since Esperanto is a logical and completely consistent language in grammar and spelling)
In Norwegian, it was accurate, but not the way I would have said it. Then again, my Norwegian is not completely up to par.
In Irish Gaelic (it blows me away that they even have this language here!), it was close to what I was thinking, but again, my Irish is quite lacking. Also, there are three major dialects and a state "official dialect" to muddy the waters with Irish Gaelic. I'm wondering which version they use here--it looks like the dialect-neutral "official language."
Oh, the Spanish voice sounded good, the French voice sounded really good, the Esperanto voice sounded like a computer, Norwegian was quite pleasant, and unfortunately, there was no Irish voice.
Anyway... pretty cool! I haven't had much time lately to put into language study, but this will be a help when I'm able to get back to it.
The true test of a translation is whether a joke can go through several languages.
A program is never going to cut it.
Translations are subjective because most words don't mean the same thing in two languages. Sure, some do - certain highly-specialized English words like 'electron' and 'esophagus' probably have perfect analogues in some other languages. But most words have numerous definitions that ultimately devolve into matters of subjective judgment.
A thousand different people who were raised bilingually in both Russian and English could translate the original Russian of the first chapter of Anna Karenina - which is all of two pages long - into English, and not a one would be the same as any other.
And jokes are so language-dependent that many cannot be translated while retaining their original punch. Such is the imprecise nature of language.
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