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posted by mrpg on Friday February 02 2018, @10:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the c'est-vrai dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:34AM (#632421)

    Maybe. But the author makes a fair argument that accurately translating even reasonably simple phrases requires contextual comprehension, rather than just semantic decoding.

    No, the author just demonstrated that Google Translate hasn't yet integrated handling of markedness [wikipedia.org], nor indexed lesser-known phrasemes [wikipedia.org]. A pure technicality.

    Data is data is data, however much anyone born into arts-and-humanities wants to argue otherwise.

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