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Out of curiosity, I decided to translate this Frisian (the closest continental language to English): http://bit.ly/2enwGyT http://bit.ly/2enwGyT It's interest

by strlen 10y ago

Out of curiosity, I decided to translate this Frisian (the closest continental language to English): http://bit.ly/2enwGyT http://bit.ly/2enwGyT It's interesting to contrast this with a side-by-side translation of "normal" English with Frisian, where the similarity is much lower.

schoen 10y ago
It would be nice to have the translation done by a human speaker. Although Google's machine translation is pretty great nowadays, I doubt it does a great job with constrained languages containing nonstandard and constructed vocabulary! I tried using Google Translate to translate this to Portuguese (which I do speak) and I found some mistakes in the translation that might not have come up in normal English. It's an interesting question to what extent you'd want the translator to understand what Anderson is trying to do and translate accordingly.
- strlen 10y ago
  Perhaps a speaker of a continental Germanic tongue could chime in? As a native Russian speaker, but one who moved to the United States 20 years ago, I do find the Google translation of Russian to be really excellent, as well as vice-versa (but Russian is much more widely spoken, including of course, by a Google Executive, than Frisian.)
  - alistoriv 10y ago
    A lot of the words coined in the essay are Anglicized versions of words used in other Germanic languages. Sourstuff as oxygen, for example, is consistent with the word in several other languages (Sauerstoff in German). Certain words, like uncleftish, are based off of the root words in the original Greek or Latin (the German word is just Atom). I could attempt to translate the essay into German, but my German is quite bad and would no doubt have some serious grammatical errors :P
- misja111 10y ago
  I was born in Friesland and although I don't speak Frysk fluently, I can say that Google didn't do a good job in translating this text. Partly that is of course due to all non-standard words such as 'uncleftish' and 'bernstonish'. But also a lot of normal English words were not translated to Frysk, e.g. 'early' would be 'eardere'.

by strlen 10y ago

schoen 10y ago

It would be nice to have the translation done by a human speaker. Although Google's machine translation is pretty great nowadays, I doubt it does a great job with constrained languages containing nonstandard and constructed vocabulary! I tried using Google Translate to translate this to Portuguese (which I do speak) and I found some mistakes in the translation that might not have come up in normal English. It's an interesting question to what extent you'd want the translator to understand what Anderson is trying to do and translate accordingly.

strlen 10y ago
Perhaps a speaker of a continental Germanic tongue could chime in? As a native Russian speaker, but one who moved to the United States 20 years ago, I do find the Google translation of Russian to be really excellent, as well as vice-versa (but Russian is much more widely spoken, including of course, by a Google Executive, than Frisian.)
- alistoriv 10y ago
  A lot of the words coined in the essay are Anglicized versions of words used in other Germanic languages. Sourstuff as oxygen, for example, is consistent with the word in several other languages (Sauerstoff in German). Certain words, like uncleftish, are based off of the root words in the original Greek or Latin (the German word is just Atom). I could attempt to translate the essay into German, but my German is quite bad and would no doubt have some serious grammatical errors :P
misja111 10y ago
I was born in Friesland and although I don't speak Frysk fluently, I can say that Google didn't do a good job in translating this text. Partly that is of course due to all non-standard words such as 'uncleftish' and 'bernstonish'. But also a lot of normal English words were not translated to Frysk, e.g. 'early' would be 'eardere'.