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Reminds me of the joke about interpreters at the European Parliament. It goes something like this: there are always 3 waves of laughter when an MEP says somethi
by zmk_ 8y ago
Reminds me of the joke about interpreters at the European Parliament. It goes something like this: there are always 3 waves of laughter when an MEP says something funny. First are the natives, then most of others who rely on translation, last are the Germans who wait for the verb.
- captainmuon 8y agoYou can turn it around, it's the English who have to wait for the object. I think in such a translation system (to text) you could just insert a placeholder and replace it later. Or (in speech) you'd just delay the sentence until it is complete. If you reach a timeout, you just render it ungramatically in the wrong word order. Especially when speaking freely and making up the sentence on the spot, you could say something like "because my mother... about wild cats on the street... [uhhm, you know] ... she warned me". Chinese also sometimes has "strange" word order for western ears, when you just state the "topic" upfront instead of building a relative clause like you would in English or German. "[Talking about] wild cats on the street, my mother warns me". A live translation system will always have a tradeoff between accurracy+elegance and latency, just like real human translators.