Kent Johnson wrote:
On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 7:08 AM, Dave Angel<da...@ieee.org> wrote:
Alan Gauld wrote:
Or the translation program that translated the expression
Out of sight, out of mind
from English to Russian and back with the result:
Invisible, lunatic
Or the expression:
"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak"
to:
"The wine is good, but the meat is rotten"
These are fun but, according to snopes.com, they are probably urban
legend rather than fact:
http://www.snopes.com/language/misxlate/machine.asp
FWIW translate.google.com correctly translates both of the above from
English to Russian and back. I wonder if they have optimized for those
phrases?
Kent
I first heard the "spirit is willing" one about 30 years ago, from my
father when he was studying Russian (written Russian, with the interest
in reading technical materials), so I concur with Snopes evaluation.
But I don't really care if it was true then or not. It got some people
to realize just how complex language automated translation might be.
As for present-day Google doing better on those, it's also possible that
those idioms have been imported into Russian by now, so that there is a
better translation possible.
My point is that in some languages, some concepts can't be literally
translated, so some idiomatic usage may be needed. I can only think of
a lousy example right now, but Chinese apparently has no distinct verb
forms for past, present, future. So they rely on other words to
indicate which they might mean. And those clues might be far displaced
from the verb in question. And I frequently have talked to recent
Chinese-American folk, who get the English for this wrong. Until they
learn to "think in English" some things are tricky.
And meatware is so much more powerful than software in these kinds of
things, I'm amazed at how good computer translations have gotten.
I remember a computer translation of a camera review, where the English
version kept referring to guns. It took a few paragraphs to figure out
they were talking about Canon.
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