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My wife was a professional translator and I did my master's thesis on the topic. With modern translation engines, there is no way you'll end up with "haze figu

My wife was a professional translator and I did my master's thesis on the topic. With modern translation engines, there is no way you'll end up with "haze figuring" or "arbitrary timberland" translating one way from any source language into English. I also doubt you could get a very specific word like "timberland" from repeated translation of "forest", intentional synonym replacement is much more likely. Also, they speak Spanish in Bolivia ;)

craftinator 5y ago
> there is no way you'll end up with "haze figuring" or "arbitrary timberland" translating one way from any source language into English. Good to know; I've always wondered at the peculiarities of different translation engines, but never really dug into them, as most modern ones seem like neural network black boxes to me. I was pointing out that there are some realistic use cases for doing round trip translations. I've used this technique at a few conferences to help straighten out my hazy understanding of a complex idea in a language I spoke quite poorly. And I do agree it is bad form to use this directly in an academic paper. > Also, they speak Spanish in Bolivia ;) To be fair they speak Bolivian Spanish, along with many other native languages! I chose Bolivia as a random target without doing any research, so thanks for the pedantic push to go learn something new; things like this are why I do love HN!