Something random I found interesting

[Antrax]

I'm curious by nature, so from time to time I use Google translate to try and figure out what happens in the Chinese forum (HONG BO!). I think this time I hit a goldmine of either incoherence or a badly failing Google translate. In either case, I thought this is funny enough to share:

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bridgebase.com%2Fforums%2Ftopic%2F55042-%2526-22266%253B%2526-23450%253B%2526-25293%253B%2526-26723%253B%2526-19982%253B%2526-30343%253B%2526-24093%253B%2526-26032%253B%2526-34915%253B%2Fpage__pid__659613%23entry659613

(If anyone knows Chinese, I'd be happy to know if the OP is really so all over the place, or if he's just too literate for automatic translation at this stage)

[Hanoi5]

What if instead of 'lovers' we read 'couples' or 'pair' as in people who play always together? The emperor has no clothes is quite a riddle though...

[Antrax]

I thought it refers to the story about the emperor's new clothes, which at least in Hebrew is used to say something is well-known but nobody wants to admit it, sort of like an elephant in the room.

[Thiros]

I prefer this translator:

 

http://www.bing.com/translator/

 

In my experience, it works a little better.

 

Whoever's idea it was to give the Chinese players their own board, that was a brilliant, really great idea. That place now almost has more posts than all of the other foreign forums combined.

[Antrax]

400 bad request :(

[barmar]

There's a (probably apocryphal) story of an early machine translation system being given the aphorism "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak". It was translated into Russian, then translated back to English, with the result being "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten". I just tried this experiment with Google Translate, trying both Russian and Chinese. In both cases, the final result was identical to the input. I guess things have gotten better.

 

However, as I understand it, Google Translate doesn't work by doing literal translation. It searches Google's database of books and web sites that have been translated by people, finding the corresponding phrases in different versions of the same work. So if the entire input phrase appears in several articles that have been translated, Google can find it and produce the idiomatic translations in both directions.

[Antrax]

You understand correctly. This leads to a new class of "problems" (features that people don't expect) - if you translate from a gender-neutral language (like English) to one where gender is implied by verb conjugations (like Hebrew), and use a sentence like "you go to work, while you clean the house", Google translate will attribute the male form to the first half and the female form to the second half. All it does is reflect the chauvinism in its existing texts, but people erroneously blame Google itself for this bias. I'm pretty sure all they do about it is "fix" (randomize the genders) specific phrases as they go viral :)