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Language
The assassin who stabbed BushPosted by Jeremy Goldkorn on Monday, December 17, 2007 at 5:55 PM
Google's translation tools are used by increasing numbers of people to get the gist of news articles and other web pages written in foreign languages. But like most machine-generated language, Google's translations do not always make sense. A Danwei reader sent in Google's translation for the English word "flippant". It comes out as "刺杀布什的凶手" or "the assassin who stabbed Bush" (see this screen shot). Rather odd. But here's how Google explains the way their translations are produced:
Google seems to have defined the Chinese translation of "flippant" by looking at a Guardian article by Charlie Brooker that hinted that someone should assasinate George Bush. After a public outcry, the paper issued an apology that read, in part: "Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action..." A Chinese summary of the affair includes the words 刺杀布什的凶手 in close proximity to the translation of the apology, so that, or something very similar, is probably responsible for Google's translation error. Which poses a question: Is this a sad indicator of how seldom the word "flippant" is translated between English and Chinese? Links and Sources
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Comments on The assassin who stabbed Bush
lolz, every guy wants to assassinate Bush must be too 轻率. Google Translate is not a dictionary so only one word usually makes no sense.
can we quit these machine translation stories? they seem to just keep popping up - a neverending joke about 'dry' being translated as 'fuck.' it was funny only the first time. it's been done to death.
Hehe, "we"? Apparently you are not a part of the "we" that enjoys these jokes.
a certain dictionary says that "flippant" means 蚂蚁和桌布: link
BTW, this is a good dictionary for translators, except for some mismatches.
yeah, 干 is played out, but this is an interesting look into the logic and methodology of google's machine translation.
Why is someone trying to kill that band that Gwen Stefani's husband sings for?
What your story misses is that this approach to translation is providing the biggest breakthroughs in machine translation in decades.
Do a Google search for English-Arabic.
A machine translator for that language pair -- built in the same way using CNN-Al Jazeera transcripts -- recently won against real, human translators in a blind comp.
The future is already here.
You got a link, Shan? I'd heard that Google's Arabic translator was better than most other machines (there was a big deal about it last year), but I hadn't heard anything about a machine vs human test. Anyway, this comment thread does a pretty good job of laying out the problems that still exist with Google-style translation.
I heard about it in a technology keynote in Feb, which is why I suggested a Google search, because I couldn't immediately find a link (how deliciously _retro_ to talk about things we've seen or read but have no _links_ for!)
I've got links to some technology built off the back of the same tech (search "English-Arabic translation automatic") and a paper about the same statistical method (search "English-Arabic competition") but not to the exact "quotable".