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Yet more nifty language technology | ||
Tags: Gadget | Translation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6106 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 1 of 5 17 December 2010 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My apologies if this has already been posted but this app looks to be of interest ...
Word Lens ad on YouTube 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Nguyen Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4905 days ago 109 posts - 195 votes Speaks: Vietnamese | Message 2 of 5 17 December 2010 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Is this for real?
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5823 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 5 17 December 2010 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's not really a translator.
The demonstration is heavily doctored to get the best out of it. For example, when the translation says "It translates the text instantly", the original Spanish is entirely the other way round: "The text translates it instantly". How so? Well, the software only translates individual words, which a lot of people wouldn't really consider "translation" at all. So when we start with: "Lo traduce el texto instantáneamente" Lo=it traduce=translates el=the texto=text instantáneamente=instantly" And that's how we've got to "it translates the text instantly". But "lo" is a neuter pronoun. It refers to sentence fragments or abstract ideas. A piece of software is not neuter. It would be either masculine or feminine. Worse, "lo" is an object pronoun. It is "it" like "him" or "her", not like "he" or "she". So "it" is what is translated. Spanish is fairly free in word order, so the subject is quite often found after everything else, so as we already have an object, "el texto" will have to be parsed as the subject. Hence "the text translates it instantly". So in order to sell their software, they've faked the results by starting with incorrect source language designed specifically provide a good "translation" in their software. It's more than a little dishonest, because their target market is exactly the sort of person who is incapable of seeing that for themselves in the demo. This is a nifty piece of software, but it's merely a nifty demonstration of real-time image manipulation. The language content is trivial to the point of being useless in most real situations. When the company is bought out by someone like Systrans and this software integrated with proper translation software, only then will we have something truly useful. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6284 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 4 of 5 17 December 2010 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
*snerk* Wow. Misrepresentation in advertising at its finest.
While you're correct that they've basically mangled the Spanish to make it translate it correctly, your explanation here is not correct. "Lo" as a pronoun is masculine (as well as neuter). It's only when it's an article that it must be neuter, and in that case it wouldn't be translated as "it" (in fact, it wouldn't be translatable as a single word at all). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5954 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 5 of 5 17 December 2010 at 11:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Did anyone else notice the horrible translation into Spanish at the end? "...Y LO VA EL OTRO DIRECCIÓN."
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