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Total idle speculation, but a while back I read about how google uses statistical algorithms to do their translations instead of using the more traditional mach
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Total idle speculation, but a while back I read about how google uses statistical algorithms to do their translations instead of using the more traditional machine translation methods. They do this by running the stats on sets of identical documents that are available in multiple languages. Given that French is the other established major international language, I suspect there is an exceptionally good corpus of text to use from international organizations like the UN. I would also suspect Canada has a huge number of documents in both English and French as well.
- cschmidt 13y agoThat's exactly what I was thinking. All UN stuff is in both English and French, and as you say Canada would be another good source.
- vidarh 13y agoPretty much all EU publications as well.
- kryptiskt 13y agoEU documents are written in twenty-seven flavors of bureaucratese though, don't know how useful that is for a corpus.
- apendleton 13y agoDefinitely: the EU, in particular, seems to be pretty inventive in their use of English, coming up with new words, novel grammatical constructions, and novel meanings for old words, and since so many of the documents are written by non-native English speakers, this inventions end up being assumed correct by other bureaucrats and re-used in subsequent writing, such that the EU has developed its own weird English pseudo-dialect. See: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4620 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4620
- gotofritz 13y agoNot all - the main three languages are English, German, and French (IIRC the Italian government just won a court case of some sort because they claimed this was discriminatory against its citizen, especially when it comes to posting job vacancies)