lost in translation...

Started by Perkele2012, Thu 05/07/2012 17:10:05

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EchosofNezhyt

#20
Quote"I have friends on Facebook who are Dutch, Israeli, Greek, Finnish, etc., and who sometimes post in their own language. But since Facebook added a translation feature, I can just click to see it translated, and even if it doesn't always work perfectly (or sometimes even at all), it's often good enough for me to know what they're saying. That's not worthless to me."

It works better then learning the language, I have to agree I don't normally get a translation that isn't understandable.


Quote"I often get emails in German that would take me maybe ten minutes to interpret. With a single click, Google Translate gives it to me in English. Even if the sentences aren't elegant, or even all grammatically correct, it takes me a fraction of the time to understand. That's not worthless to me."

I have my android apps set in all the markets so I get emails from all over and this helps me a ton too and 90% of the time I can convey what I wanted to say through translation.

QuoteI sometimes find websites, e.g. Wikipedia articles, that are only available in languages I don't know; but I can run them through Google Translate and (with some effort) read and understand them. That's not worthless to me.

This is another big use, Which also normally works good.


Anywho I agree with snarky, You make it sound like unless the translation is 100% in every aspect it is not worth it.

Snarky

One more example of a "worthless" translation that isn't perfect, this time a more literary one from Swedish to English:

The Stieg Larsson "Millennium" trilogy (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc.) has sold more than 65 million copies worldwide, most of those in translation. It has been enjoyed by millions of readers, made a fortune for the publishers and for Larsson's heirs, and been adapted into film twice over.

And the English translation is generally considered to suck.

Somehow, people can deal with it and enjoy it anyway, even if the sentences don't read well in English, even if it doesn't capture all the nuances of Larsson's tone or his meaning. Now I don't know how many of the total copies sold have been in English, but it's almost certainly a large fraction of them. The first book certainly wouldn't have been made into a Hollywood movie if it hadn't been for the English edition.

But if it's not perfect in every detail, I guess it's worthless. Worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but still: worthless.

Kweepa

For another writer working in his non-native tongue, see Milan Kundera. His early novels are Czech, but his recent novels are written in French.

I was surprised to read that the English translation of the Millennium trilogy "sucks". I enjoyed the books, and didn't notice anything terrible about the translation. Was this suckage in the syntax or semantics? Of course, when reading translated work, I do like to feel a bit of the original leaking through.

Tuomas did make one interesting point, I thought, when discussing the choice of corpus for google's pattern matching translation. I have no doubt they've thought of that. I imagine it would be relatively (relative to the rest of the task, that is) easy to categorize a sufficiently large piece of input.

For a long discussion about the art of translation, can I suggest "Le Ton Beau de Marot" by Doug Hofstadter? It's one of my favourite books, and covers a lot of the topics brought up here.

Anyway, to go back to the translation by Perkele. To be blunt, either you are either not fluent enough or too careless for the task. It would make a good start for a native English speaker to take and polish.

For example, the first sentence changes from "THE stomach" and "THE spine" to "HIS throat". I don't think there's a good reason for that.

The second sentence doesn't have a capital letter. Is that translation, or an error? There are all kinds of errors like this littering the translation.

The third sentence is really two sentence separated by a comma. This is not good English. Again, this construction is throughout the translation.

The fourth sentence changes tense from past to present. I suspect this is a translation error. Of course it could be in the original, but a translator has to ask whether it was just an error in the original, or if it serves some purpose, and translate appropriately.

Here's a quick rewrite. Compare this with yours.

Monday, 10th of May, 2010 [reformatted]
[The Dream] [capitalized]

The pain is creeping, slowly, through his stomach, further around his spine and then up towards his throat. [Tense change. the->his.]
Vomit is not far away. [Tense change. Removed "The" and "now". I removed those words because there is no vomit, now or later, despite what seems like an eternity passing, so this makes the sentence seem more potential than actual.]
His breathing stops for a while. It seems like an eternity. [Tense change. The->His. I split the sentence in two.]
His heart is pounding hard in his chest: his pulse increases dramatically. [Added "His" at the start of the sentence. I also replace the "and" with a colon to indicate that the two events are connected.]
Frenetically, he tries to wipe the blood off his hands, but it has dried. [I added a "but" here to clean up the sentence. I also removed the ellipsis as it didn't seem to lead anywhere.]
Now it feels like tears are eating away his cheeks. [Removed "the" from tears, to reduce their emphasis.]
He wants to scream, he wants out of his body - his muscles twist in pain;
the only sound he manages to get out is a silent gasp.
[This was the hardest sentence to work with. I left the first comma, because the repetition of "he wants" makes it seem like the sentence is starting again, and I feel the rules can be bent without it reading wrong; but I changed the second comma to a dash. The dash is harder to explain. I just tried several conjunctions until I got what felt right. I also tried breaking this sentence into two, three, four sentences. Since it's the end of the dream, I feel a slight (note - slight!) collapse of grammar isn't inappropriate.]
Still waiting for Purity of the Surf II

Perkele2012

Quote from: Kweepa on Sat 07/07/2012 17:43:20

Anyway, to go back to the translation by Perkele. To be blunt, either you are either not fluent enough or too careless for the task. It would make a good start for a native English speaker to take and polish.


it´s probably a bit of both,from what i can remember english grammar & spelling was alot better when i was 14-23, but yes, i was quite careless in that translation, maybe careless aint the right word here... i was lazy.
but even so, it was quite an example of how things can get "strange" when you take away the personal touch by letting a software do the translation.


Tuomas

#24
Obviously my studies have made me a purist, not probably a good thing, but I guess it's because language is to me a goal and not a mean anymore. How sad :(

Also it's true, I'm quite aware of people writing in a non-native language, I actually wrote my bachelor's on mirgant-literature as a part of the German culture of bildungsroman and such. It sucked, but at least I finished it :)

Snarky

Resurrecting an old thread because this article made me think of it:

QuoteStarting today, Google will rely more heavily on artificial intelligence when it translates language. The new method, called Google Machine Neural Translation, cuts down errors by 80% compared to its current algorithm, and is nearly indistinguishable from human translation on standardized tests, the company said.

http://qz.com/792621/googles-new-ai-powered-translation-tool-is-nearly-as-good-as-a-human-translator/

We're living through an AI revolution. It will be very interesting to see where it leads. (One consequence will almost certainly be the loss of jobs in many fields, as more and more tasks can be automated.)

Mandle

Quote from: Snarky on Wed 28/09/2016 10:02:30
Resurrecting an old thread because this article made me think of it:

QuoteStarting today, Google will rely more heavily on artificial intelligence when it translates language. The new method, called Google Machine Neural Translation, cuts down errors by 80% compared to its current algorithm, and is nearly indistinguishable from human translation on standardized tests, the company said.

http://qz.com/792621/googles-new-ai-powered-translation-tool-is-nearly-as-good-as-a-human-translator/

We're living through an AI revolution. It will be very interesting to see where it leads. (One consequence will almost certainly be the loss of jobs in many fields, as more and more tasks can be automated.)

I was using google translate last weekend and was amazed at how well it was putting sentences together. I was expecting to have to spend time figuring out what it was trying to say and then rewriting that into something that made sense...But instead mostly all I had to do was rewrite it into the right tone for the character/situation...

Maybe they released it in stages?

Danvzare

Now we just need this technology to work on any text on screen, even images, so we can finally play all those games that were never translated! :-D

Mandle

Quote from: Danvzare on Wed 28/09/2016 19:51:46
Now we just need this technology to work on any text on screen, even images, so we can finally play all those games that were never translated! :-D

Now THAT'S a cool idea! And probably quite easy to do: All the pieces exist. Somebody just needs to tie them all together... If somebody already hasn't...

As for the technology taking jobs away from humans: I doubt this will happen anytime soon: Even if the computer can write a flawless sentence with the same meaning, it still does not understand the context of the line, the personality of the speaker/writer, the emotion behind the language, or the overall story of the novel/game/etc...

And for it to understand all that: It would need to be a true A.I. with human emotions which ain't happening anytime soon...

Snarky

Quote from: Mandle on Wed 28/09/2016 23:27:22
As for the technology taking jobs away from humans: I doubt this will happen anytime soon: Even if the computer can write a flawless sentence with the same meaning, it still does not understand the context of the line, the personality of the speaker/writer, the emotion behind the language, or the overall story of the novel/game/etc...

And for it to understand all that: It would need to be a true A.I. with human emotions which ain't happening anytime soon...

I was talking about AI in general, not just for translation, but again I think you guys are focusing on the wrong thing. I would bet that 90% of paid translation jobs are not in any way "artistic"; it's for business letters, instruction manuals, restaurant menus, multilingual signs, textbooks, news reports, corporate websites... and a whole lot of it is for laws, treaties and contracts, which will of course still at least need human verification (though perhaps less than you'd think: there's a lot of boilerplate). Not to mention the work done for intelligence organizations.

And there are plenty of other industries and professions that could be disrupted by the fall of language barriers, leading to consolidation and rataionalization (tech support is an obvious one).

Mandle

Very true, Snarky...But also, like you mentioned, a lot of those other spplications would be double-checked by a human translator before being used for real: Now, if a human translator is checking each line for mistakes, it might be a bit faster than if they were translating it on their own from scratch, but not all that much faster: They still have to check the original language vs. the translated language for accuracy. All it really cuts down on is the typing...

Now, if the translation program ever reaches the level of sophistication where a human double-check is no longer needed: That's a whole new ballgame indeed!

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