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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: 5, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 03 2018, @12:13AM (6 children)
An English to Russian and back to English translation I heard about a long time ago. The original sentence was "The flesh is weak but the spirit is strong."
But let's not talk as if humans never make bad translations. I also heard of a Russian diplomat proposing a toast upon concluding some negotiations with the US, in which he obviously meant "bottoms up", but instead said "up your bottoms."
Machine translation has always been basically braindead, barely more than word substitution. It is getting better, have upgraded to phrase substitution. But the entire approach may not be that good. There are tons of idioms and puns that can't be translated so literally.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 03 2018, @01:06AM (3 children)
I hear Chinese is complicated in the same way because the same syllables could mean either "the valiant horsemen" or "fuck your mother" depending on the tonality of the phrase.
As for Russians, they have no word for "security." What they say instead is, "lack of insecurity."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @02:34AM
And there is no word in Russian for "Ethanol_fueled", they just say, "Russian".
(Score: 3, Informative) by legont on Saturday February 03 2018, @05:49AM (1 child)
Actually Russians say "lack of danger". There is no security in the world so the word "security" has no meaning after all.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @11:31AM
But as with so many other things, while there might be no meaning, there sure is a massive industry.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Saturday February 03 2018, @03:39PM
The version I heard was:
...into Russian and back became
But, it is apocryphal - see here: http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/MTNI-11-1995.pdf [hutchinsweb.me.uk] - it possibly originates from a comment made by E.H. Ullrich in April 1956 on a lecture concerning Machine Translation, where the poor translation is given as an example of human, not machine work.
There's also an old Snopes - https://www.snopes.com/language/misxlate/machine.asp [snopes.com]
(Score: 2) by tfried on Saturday February 03 2018, @09:32PM
Try this: http://www.translationparty.com/ [translationparty.com]