Submitted via IRC for Bytram
[...] 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: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Saturday February 03 2018, @04:33AM
"Wipe out" is a mediopassive verb [wikipedia.org], like "bake". In "He baked cookies", the subject is the agent, and the object is the patient. In "The cookies baked", the subject is the patient. Likewise with "wipe out": When used transitively ("he wiped somebody out"), it implies that the subject defeated the object. But when used intransitively ("he wiped out"), the analogy is to a surfer who completely loses control of his board, and the subject is defeated. The word "on" takes "that boss" out of the direct object position, forcing the intransitive interpretation.