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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 vux984 on Saturday February 03 2018, @09:08PM (2 children)
Context always matters. There was enough in my post to make it crystal clear to anyone who played multiplayer online games for any length of time to recognize that as the context; and they would easily understand the slang/jargon. And it sees use in other contexts as well.
To 'wipe' or 'wipe out' in an encounter is to have everyone in your team / group / adventuring party killed.
e.g.
"We were killing goblins in the huts when so-and-so popped in and wiped out the group."
"We had the goblin king down to half health when he went berserk and wiped out the entire party in 5 seconds."
"We were burning down the troll queen, when the ranger accidentally pulled the king, and we had to evacuate or it would have been a wipe.
"I've seen groups of endgame level players wipe on that boss if they aren't paying attention, but he's easy as long you do A-B-C.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday February 04 2018, @01:10AM (1 child)
To me "boss" suggested some sort of work environment, not a game. I didn't even consider that gaming was a possible scenario for the comment. I'll admit that my most recent multi-player gaming was D&D, and that prior to the domination of the field by TSR. But I *am* a native speaker of English. "Wipe-out" to me suggested either skiing or "wall of death" skateboarding, though I was aware that it wasn't limited to those areas...still, I presume that it's usage in other areas is derivative from those uses. (That was the "sense of menace" I saw, which was vague because there are lots of figurative uses of "wipe-out". E.g., the skate-board and skiing uses are themselves probably derivative figurative uses from the military use.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Sunday February 04 2018, @02:42AM
As I said, it's slang/jargon from multiplayer gaming; although now the jargon and slang has migrated BACK to pen and paper; so it wouldn't be uncommon at all for people playing D&D to use terms such as pull, aggro, boss, evac, wipe, etc when describing a D&D encounter these days.
" "Wipe-out" to me suggested either skiing or "wall of death" skateboarding, though I was aware that it wasn't limited to those areas...still, I presume that it's usage in other areas is derivative from those uses."
Yeah, maybe. I'm honestly not sure. It could also be derivative of 'wiping the slate clean' with everybody dead and back at a respawn point and having to restart the encounter from scratch; or perhaps from 'wiped out' as an extinction level event "the meteor wiped out the dinosaurs" and in the same way the group was obliterated. To me that actually resonates a bit more strongly than simply a skate-board crash or car accident, but I couldn't say with any authority where it came from.