ENGRISH: Funny? Politically Insensitive? (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

ENGRISH: Funny? Politically Insensitive?
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

25 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4

Oz_Andy
Diglot
Newbie
Australia
Joined 5128 days ago
7 posts - 13 votes
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French, Russian, German

Message 25 of 25

11 July 2010 at 10:08am | IP Logged

furrykef wrote:

Oz_Andy wrote:

with the increase in both the sophistication of internet translation tools

What increase? Computers are never going to be decent at translating until they achieve intelligence. That's because language simply requires intelligence to parse correctly. Too much depends on context, and to understand the context, you must... well... understand it.

I suppose the kind of increase I was referring to was not so much the result of computers developing intelligence, but rather to do with translation programs becoming more comprehensive in terms of the number of set-phrases and interpretations they might include. Of course, this will *far* from eliminate the possibility of mistranslation (one wouldn't expect to run classical Chinese poetry through google translate for perfect results), but given the relatively predictable context of the short, sharp phrases found on road-signs, doors etc (from which most Engrish is sourced), it would reduce the margin of error considerably.

Although perhaps a weak example (not actually Engrish), the phrase "keep off the grass!", if run through google translate comes out in Spanish as "¡prohibido pisar el césped!", which seems legit, and indicates a correct (probability based) assumption of context, incidentally lacking from another (presumably less comprehensive) tool I used.

Edited by Oz_Andy on 11 July 2010 at 10:28am

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