3 ms·
It's an interesting experiment, but I don't trust the conclusion. Automatic translation still tends to be fairly literal, rather than idiomatic. I have a suspic
by lmkg 17y ago
It's an interesting experiment, but I don't trust the conclusion. Automatic translation still tends to be fairly literal, rather than idiomatic. I have a suspicion that this tends to increase the average message length. An interesting experiment would be to translate English tweets into those various target languages, and compare the two. If my hunch is right, the text will get bigger in both directions. The ratio between the increases may be a good measure of the information density of idiomatic expression.
- bensummers 17y agoYou're right, it's absolutely unscientific and the results are of dubious statistical significance. Going through machine translation makes the whole thing pointless anyway. But it was fun to write, which I suppose was the actual point of it. One of the joys of being able to program computers is that when you want to have such a question answered, you can a short bit of code to get the answer.