Instant Translation
“Saluti a tutti i miei amici in Italia! Il vostro paese è uno degli più affascinanti e belle nell’intero mondo; la vostra storia è stupefacente. La mia sorella e la sua famiglia in tensione in Italia ora e stanno godendola molto. Spero di visitare il vostro paese bello un certo giorno!”
(via Digg) This is really, really cool: an on-the-fly translator that uses AJAX to almost instantly translate the text that you type. Available languages (so far) are English, Spanish, German, Italian, Portugese, and French. Go try it!
Uh…hold on. When I went back to the site and entered the Italian text above to see how it would translate back to English, this is what I got: “Salutes to all my friends in Italy! Your country is one of the more beautiful fascinating and in the entire world; your history is narcotic. My sister and its family in tension in Italy hour and are enjoying it a lot. I hope to visit your beautiful country a sure day!” Interesting.
Actually, that really isn’t that horrible for an online translator- Italian grammar is super tricky with its plurals and gendered nouns and this didn’t do too bad a job! Google’s translator used to make me laugh quite hard…But explain: why are your sister and her family feeling so much tension in Italy? It’s the prices in Euros, right?
Happy New Year, David!!
VZ
Thanks Dave — I’ll use this the next time I need to ask my neighbor if I can borrow her can opener so I can open Rachel’s can of Spaghettios
I muddled my way through the first time I needed her opener…:)
Ciao!
Not bad for a non-human translator - they’re all too direct and literal for frilly, idiomatic languages like French (or apparently, Italiano, which is so much like French that I was able to ‘get by’ while in Italy).
You may recall (or not) that I used to work on a CompuServe forum that featured MT (machine translation). This is not a whole lot better than what we saw there, from 1995-2000. So it would appear that MT hasn’t advanced that far in the past 10 years.
On my old computer — which I can’t access right now because the video card is shot and they don’t make ‘em for Windows 3.x systems anymore — I have some of the more amusing translations. My favorite was from someone complaining about his car problems, and it referred to his Toyota’s “bris.” I still don’t know what that supposed to mean….
Argh! Right after I hit submit, I remembered a short article pertaining to MT that appeared in The Wittenburg Door. You can find it in the online archives here:
http://wittenburgdoor.com/archives/23rd_google.html