Chekhov's Mistress
On Translation
I checked my referrer stats today and found a German blog linking to my post on “serious magazines.” I don’t speak German so I turned to Systran (through Apple’s Sherlock app), and this is what I got (Blogblitz):
I present me so that everything, which publishes in the InterNet literature – because publishes the primary is, and not writing – that all these InterNet man of letters want nothing more ardently, as to clean-come into the legitimate culture. To Suhrkamp. Hardcover!
I can guess what this means (it doesn’t sound exactly approving, does it), but it speaks of how far away machine translation is from capturing meaning or even basic sentences (or I could just say, Systran, you suck!, but so does Babelfish and everything else I’ve used).
comments
I wrote a paper on machine translation in grad school. Basically, the state of the art is used in technical writing, and requires writers to write in a particular way, removing ambiguous phrasing that troubles machines. Training writers to do this is difficult, but the result is that a company can have technical manuals automatically translated into dozens of languages, saving millions of dollars.
But the problem of machine translation is so difficult that I expect it will be many decades before ordinary writing is readily translated into other languages.
– Dave Munger (04/06 at 06:38 AM)
I’m glad to know that our friends in Germany will get the same incisive commentary we depend on here in the states....
Man!
I popped by to compliment you on the great post against yet another dumb anti-blogging article, but that’s a few posts down.
In the meantime, I don’t think Edith Grossman need fear for her livelihood.
– Anne (04/06 at 06:56 AM)
Dave, I worked for a company that used that sort of thing to translate marketing brochures, which has its own irony. It says a lot about language that machines can play chess, yet not translate.
And thanks Anne!
– Bud Parr (04/06 at 09:33 AM)
The beauty of some of these translations is that on a rare occasion they read like poetry - particularly the Mandarin to English variety.
– Darren (04/10 at 07:59 AM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: April 05, 2006
- Filed Under:
Translation
- Comments:4
- Links to this Post: Technorati
