The Machine Translation Equilibrium

translationparty.com

11 points·gtzi··6 comments

Sure it's funny, but it could be useful.

If we take a list of all found equilibrium expressions and have a human translator eliminate the ones that have different meanings in the source and destination languages, we'll have a list of phrases that can be transmitted safely through google translate.

A phrasebook like that would be worth a lot, to me at least. Two applications where a phrasebook might be good enough are tourism and freelance web development.

edit: Here's a great example "The problem is Internet Explorer 6 support." (assuming that means something vaguely similar in the Japanese version, of course)

This was a popular-ish thing to do with AltaVista's Babelfish about (probably more than) 10 years ago. A friend used this back-and-forth technique to mix up song lyrics. A teacher did the same to generate bizarre text for class handouts.

A time-honored classic.

Can we get a english<->russian version? (or any<->any)

Just tried with "i am a boy but not a girl", never reaches equilibrium

Since machine translation doesn't work well at the moment, I don't think it's interesting when an example fails to reach equilibrium. I'm not sure what your point is here.

Additionally, I'm not sure your example, "i am a boy but not a girl", parses in English. Being a boy does not normally make one a girl, so wouldn't "...and not a girl" make more sense?

I know it is not grammatically correct. Was just experimenting for phrases which would not reach equilibrium.

The above mentioned phrase actually reaches an oscillatory state, which is kind of cool.

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