From: Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...>
Date: 2006-08-31T22:25:05+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] How to spy on the Japanese Rubists

On 8/30/06, Paul Robinson <paul@iconoplex.co.uk> wrote:
> On 29 Aug 2006, at 23:50, Max Muermann wrote:
>
> > Translating the Rubist Magazine FAQ came up with the following gem:
> >
> > Q. there is no article of the ~~ in the [ru] [bi] [ma] why?
> > Motivation bean jam?
> >
> > I too get Motivation bean jam sometimes... it's not something I would
> > talk about in mixed company, though.
>
> That's such a great name for a Ruby blog...
>
> In fact, we could turn 'Engrish' back on itself and do thousands of
> new t-shirts off this tool. I'd wear a t-shirt depicting Motivation
> bean jam. Maybe.
>
> Why is machine translation so bad anyway? It's only changing one set
> of vocabulary and grammar for an equivalent set - it would seem that
> the biggest problem with most tools out there is ridiculously small
> foreign language dictionaries and tiny grammar rule sets. Very odd,
> and probably quite easy to fix.
>
>
Heh, it's not so.

Have you ever tried to learn a foriegn language?

The possible meanings you could try to convey are more or less like a
continuous space sliced into chunks - words. The slicing is different
for different languages, somewhere finer, somewhere coarser as the
speakers of various languages needed more precision in different
areas.

For one, I heared that Eskimos use some tens of various words for
different kinds of snow and ice. You get the idea.

Even in areas where the needs for precision weren't very different the
slicing often happens at different places. So one word would be
translated as different words in different contexts, often in both
ways.

And the grammar is far from equivalent. I already found English
sentences that I can understand (or so I think) but which would need
several sentences to be explained in my native language.
And these are both Indoeuropean languages. Japanese grammar is much
more interesting :)

The only correct translation can come from analyzing the meaning of a
sentence in context of the previous text, and constructing sentence(s)
in the other language with similar meaning. Of course, this is nearly
impossible to do with a computer.

Thanks

Michal