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[...] When I first got interested in the subject, in the mid-1970s, I ran across a letter written in 1947 by the mathematician Warren Weaver, an early machine-translation advocate, to Norbert Wiener, a key figure in cybernetics, in which Weaver made this curious claim, today quite famous:
When I look at an article in Russian, I say, "This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode."
[...] The practical utility of Google Translate and similar technologies is undeniable, and probably it's a good thing overall, but there is still something deeply lacking in the approach, which is conveyed by a single word: understanding. Machine translation has never focused on understanding language. Instead, the field has always tried to "decode"—to get away without worrying about what understanding and meaning are. Could it in fact be that understanding isn't needed in order to translate well? Could an entity, human or machine, do high-quality translation without paying attention to what language is all about? To shed some light on this question, I turn now to the experiments I made.
It is a bit on the long side but Douglas Hofstadter very clearly exposes what language translation is and that Google Translate does not do it that way
Source: The Shallowness of Google Translate
(Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Saturday February 03 2018, @12:13AM (2 children)
I'm betting DeepL has seen all those literary texts before, and been tweaked till it gets them almost right.
That's hardly the measure of a instant translation tool. Any tool that can suss out shades of meaning in a literary work will insert those into translations of everyday writing, where no such thing is intended.
Most of the time, when you ask what the soup of the day is, you want to know exactly that.
(Score: 1) by whathappenedtomonday on Saturday February 03 2018, @12:23AM (1 child)
> I'm betting DeepL has seen all those literary texts before, and been tweaked till it gets them almost right.
Not sure what you mean ... Google has all those text indexed (in several languages) and still its translations often lack the most basic coherence. See the Google book search -- Google has "seen" all those texts and still "Trans" produces crap when translating literature. As I said: "In my experience ..." . Feel free to add yours.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 03 2018, @01:04AM
Speaking of adding experiences, Google Translate used to have an option that said something like "add your correction" or some shit. Now they just have a link which says, "join the community," probably to cut down on nihilist pranksters or perhaps because its algos became good enough.
Anyway, some cheap laughs for your pleasure. [google.com]