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It's shocking that such a naive model produces such good results. I suspect it has to do with the languages they are translating: if they wanted to translate J

by jibiki 18y ago

It's shocking that such a naive model produces such good results. I suspect it has to do with the languages they are translating: if they wanted to translate Japanese to German it would take more sophisticated methods.

jimbokun 18y ago
You would probably need to worry a lot more about morphology with those languages.
tokenadult 18y ago
One reason current machine translation looks pretty good is that over the years a lot of human translation has been remarkably bad. (I say this as a former member of the American Translators Association who made my living for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter.) Most clients of most translators can only check the accuracy of one of the translator's languages, which allows for a good bit of bluffing. I'm getting better and better satisfied since the 1990s with machine-translated texts I see on the Web, for example translations of my own personal homepage into other languages I know well enough to read.
mtpark 18y ago
I'm surprised there's little mention of either context or culture. I think those are two of the most important elements of translation. Without context, it's impossible to know the tone, or sometimes even the actual grammar/conjugation of translations for certain languages (I'm thinking Korean/Chinese but this probably applies for other languages as well). Context also helps tremendously with disambiguation, one huge flaw in machine translation. Culture is another interesting aspect. What somebody might translate as a greeting might require a totally different literal translation in another language, but it's always hard to justify translations that aren't exactly literal. This usually impacts tone quite a bit. From my experience, conversational style for the major Asian languages is indirect and hinting. Most people already understand the importance of cultural differences, this is strongly present in speech as well.

by jibiki 18y ago

jimbokun 18y ago

You would probably need to worry a lot more about morphology with those languages.

tokenadult 18y ago

One reason current machine translation looks pretty good is that over the years a lot of human translation has been remarkably bad. (I say this as a former member of the American Translators Association who made my living for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter.) Most clients of most translators can only check the accuracy of one of the translator's languages, which allows for a good bit of bluffing. I'm getting better and better satisfied since the 1990s with machine-translated texts I see on the Web, for example translations of my own personal homepage into other languages I know well enough to read.

mtpark 18y ago

I'm surprised there's little mention of either context or culture. I think those are two of the most important elements of translation. Without context, it's impossible to know the tone, or sometimes even the actual grammar/conjugation of translations for certain languages (I'm thinking Korean/Chinese but this probably applies for other languages as well). Context also helps tremendously with disambiguation, one huge flaw in machine translation. Culture is another interesting aspect. What somebody might translate as a greeting might require a totally different literal translation in another language, but it's always hard to justify translations that aren't exactly literal. This usually impacts tone quite a bit. From my experience, conversational style for the major Asian languages is indirect and hinting. Most people already understand the importance of cultural differences, this is strongly present in speech as well.