[sldev] Please help testing the SL Viewer with integrated universal translation

[Henri Beauchamp]

To avoid excessive noise on the list, I'm grouping two replies here,
and this will be my last message on the list about this topic (email
me privately if you wish to continue the argument, please).


On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:34:17 -0800, Kelly Linden wrote:

> I personally think this was a great project!  I also think the method of 
> soliciting feedback and review on this list was great.  Even if you 
> disagree with the idea of computer translation this project is an 
> excellent example of one kind of thing people will want to do with a 
> plug-in system.  Looking at what it took to integrate this is a good use 
> case for any plug-in api.
> 
> Thanks Joy!

I never said it was a bad example of user-ran project neither that the
request for feedback on this list was a bad idea.

I simply said it was pretty doomed to failure because of the poor
(and actually pitiful) results returned by the automatic translators
it is relying on.

In any case, should it make its way into the official viewers some day,
pretty please, make it an *optional* feature that each user can *disable*
entirely on their end. Else, you'll find many non-English speakers muted
in world...


On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:29:31 -0500, Mike Monkowski wrote:

> Henri Beauchamp wrote:
> >>>Automatic translators are utterly useless and totally unable to translate
> >>>properly from simple languages such as English into more complex and subtle
> >>>languages such as French, German, Chinese, Japanese...
> ...
> > You can say and explain very complex things, even with "simple" languages,
> > but I assure you that English is incredibly simpler than French or German
> > (since I did learn all three, I know what I am speaking about).
> > The grammar is incredibly much simpler in English, and the vocabulary is
> > simpler too. For example, you can translate "to get" in at least 30
> > different verbs in French. or "power" into two different names (these are
> > just two examples out of my head, but cases are countless).
> > Fact is that at school (some 4 decades ago), I just needed a couple of
> > months to learn the basis of English, while even after three years, I
> > could never express myself as fluently in German (and since forgot
> > pretty much everything I was taught in this language). That's also one of
> > the reasons why English is so successful as an international "common"
> > language: it's easier to learn and use than most (if not all) other
> > languages.
> 
> Perhaps it's just that speakers of English are more tolerant of mistakes 
> than are Francophones.

My point was not about simple mistakes, such as using the wrong pronoum
and/or gender, but about the very meaning of the translated text (which
can become right out the opposite of what the original text was all about),
something automatic translators are very prone to produce.

> Although your English is not bad,

Thank you.

It is good enough to clearly express my thoughts and avoid misunderstandings,
which is really all what I care about. I don't pretend writing a perfect and
100% grammatically correct English, but if I were to write this very email
in French and then run it through an automatic translator before sending it
on this list, my guess is that you won't understand a single thing...

However, judging someone's skills, based on an email they wrote in five
minutes and did not re-read, is not very reliable a method...

> "incredibly much simpler" is not good English.

If you say so.

> One translates "into" not "in".

Yeah, I used "in" in one place by mistake and "into" just a few words later,
which only proves I did not re-read myself before pressing the "Send" button
of my email client.

> You meant "nouns", not "names".

True. I really should have seen that one while writing it... Shame on me !

> "Out of my head" means lost emotional control.  I assume you meant
> "off the top of my head".

This is an idiomatic expression that does not translate directly into
French and Google gives the word for word translation "sur le haut de
ma tête" (which would be the case for a hat when worn, but certainly
not for examples given "off the top of my head") instead of the proper
equivalent expression which is "qui me vienent à l'esprit".
As you can see the automatic translator is still much worst than me :-P

> That's "basics", not "basis".

Shame on me again, should have seen that one too.

> It should be "have since forgotten", not "since forgot".

One of the grammatical rules in English that I can never porperly
remember (we French got many troubles with the use of "since", "for"
and "ago" together with their associated tenses).

> I have been trying to learn French for decades.  The problem I have is 
> that the only places I can hear it spoken is on my XM radio and on 
> rented videos.

And reading the net-speak of so many English writers on Internet won't
help you either if you were, like me, a French guy trying to improve
his skills via practice...

>  From my experience, Chinese grammar is less complex than English 
> grammar; Spanish phonetics are more consistent than any of the languages 
> you list above; and three and four year old children are amazingly adept 
> at learning any language.

So what ?... This does not make English a more complex language, neither
French a simpler one. I'm afraid your argument is moot.
And I did not even speak about the spelling in French (or German), the
number of tenses (19 in French), or the declinations in German...

You sound like making it a merit related thing to speak one language
or another based on its complexity, while my point was to show that
automatic translators are (currently) unable to translate properly
*because* of the differences in this complexity (translating one verb
such as "to get", or an adjective such as "free" from English to French
and vice versa is not a bijective operation, and that's why it fails in
automatic translators as they currently are unable to "understand" what
they are translating, or at least to make a guess work using the context)...

Regards,

Henri.