Is Automatic Translation 100% reliable yet?

Probably not:

click here

I use the Bing Translator. That way there's no need to download anything to my computer.

http://www.bing.com/translator

More than likely an author only needs a few sentences. Just a thought, Alan.

B

This is the automatic translation of a French post, on a french spanking site, into English:


When rampant on the canvas there animating a site a little busy, it is not uncommon to receive all kinds of messages, a direct message on the blog allowing users around the world to send me what they want: encouragement, demands of all kinds, insults, images, etc ... Then "over" which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times a bunch of places on the planet since February 2006 is sometimes the object of spontaneous affection or surprising vengeance complete, obviously unknown anonymous ... In general, I must admit that it is rather nice things. But occasionally, a (e) hard (e) "means my virtual skin" for reasons that escape me ... One or a stranger who decided without consulting me that I belonged to him, a rectifier wrongly net destroyer of bad manners, morals censor vigilante who does not like that I would write and wants to go gorge, crazy thinking that I'm the man of her life and wants my body, my hands, my ears and my tail, olé. If I count, I'm a dozen men and women (who are not the least aggressive) mixed, which in recent years polluted my mailbox with their cyber attacks.


Which is understandable but may have lost some nuances in the translation.

(But, in my experience, translations are now about 1000% better than they were a year ago. Bilinguals are able to give translation hints to the more popular online programs, which is why they seem to be improving over time).

"translations are now about 1000% better than they were a year ago."
You are really optimistic! Even the site Linguee that I thought was the best one, is not reliable.

"When rampant on the canvas"??? The mind opens its eyes wide and stares in an ugly fashion.

Most automatic translations struggle to select the right meaning if a word can mean more than one thing. Also the quoted text above seems awkward in English not only because of peculiar word choice but also because it has stuck too closely to a French style of writing. A real live translator would have broken up some of those long sentences.

I used to contribute to a story site which had automatic translation into several languages. I had no way of checking most, but my impression was that the German was considerably better than the French.

Than there's those programmes that render spoken text into written for hard-of-hearing people. They have almost nil ability to judge meaning by context and can come up with real gems such as, in a feature on the vulnerability of government computers to organised hackers, "hostile cider attack".

Not perfect - nowhere near - but far, far better than the early test rigs.

Feedback by bilingual users has led to a lot of idioms being translated idiomatically and not literally.

In my experience, German to English is having the hardest time of it, because the Germans seem to have more idioms than any one else. And the same words are used with different meanings. For example "seeing white mice" can mean seeing traffic cops or being drunk (among other things). It depends upon the context, and putting stuff into context is only just starting to happen in the world of automatic translators.

I have a professional interest in this field, and whilst machine translation is a remarkably clever technology, and can effectively translate conversational sentences, it is still poor at translating prose.

With my author's head on the reason is obvious. Machine translation relies on having seen a phrase before, preferably hundreds of times, with only subtle variations. But prose is by its very nature a unique creation, any paragraph I write will never have been seen before, ever, in human history. We write with idioms, allusions, allegories and puns - constructs machines find very difficult to handle.

As a result, machine translations are clunky, they read poorly, the meaning of what was written often survives but its elan is lost. And I use that word deliberately.

Perfect automated translation will have to wait until machines understand what's written, and that won't happen for a long time yet...

You could give it a try.

I can't help chuckling when I think of an handyman using the sealing compound as an enema. Could you sue the seller for damages? Probably in the States.

Here is the opening of one of my Norwegian spanking stories translated by Google Tranlate:

She lay with her face pressed into the pillow and noticed that the tears ran down his cheeks , made ​​cushion cover wet. She had just received rice, and although she had released birch rod this time , her mother shake her so long and hard that it stung and burned the whole ass . But she did not cry just because it hurt , she cried just as much because it was so ignominious and embarrassing. In the next room , on the other side of the thin wall, put her sister and had probably heard it all - first the high Voters and so the sharp creases classes mixed with groans that eventually was passed to outright howl . There was no doubt that Ingvild knew she had just received rice, and that was what was the most ignominious - the whole story had begun when she discovered that Ingvild suspected her of obtaining rice for accommodation in Torgeir . Yes, her sister had not only suspected her, she had also told her friends about the suspicion. She remembered how it had blacked her when she discovered her sister's indiscretion , and how she blind rage had passed away on Ingvild and kicked and scratched . They had landed in a clump on the floor with her ​​top, and she had not stopped giving her sister bank before mom got removed her by force .

It's better than James Joyce!

What surprises me about that is that many sentences are obviously ungrammatical. Translations I've seen have genrally been grammatical even if ridiculous.