tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Dec 03 13:06:02 2009

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Re: Internet abused by terrible tweets in Klingon!

Christopher Doty ([email protected])



Yeah, I guess I don't feel like this thing is actually doing any
machine translation.  It's just finding a word, scanning an
English-Klingon lexicon, and plugging in a matching word.  Which
doesn't work, of course, when you're getting <Daq> as its own word...
Their translation software just doesn't seem to even be making an
effort to render the English meaning in Klingon....

Sad.  Maybe Tracy's project can help straighten them out :p

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 12:55, Mark J. Reed <[email protected]> wrote:
> But Klingon is no less machine-translatable than English, either.  MT
> is pretty bad in general, but it's getting better all the time (Google
> Translate does much better than even the most expensive commercial
> software did just a few years ago).  It's not a replacement for human
> translation, and I doubt it ever will be unless we develop true AI,
> but it's a very useful aid to understanding.
>
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Heather Myers <[email protected]> wrote:
>> There's an 'improve this translation' button on it... I did a couple.  But
>> ouch.  My poor brain!  Klingon is no more machine-translatable than
>> English.  They should try Lojban.
>> 2009/12/3 qurgh lungqIj <[email protected]>
>>
>>> I've been working with these folks, trying to improve their translation
>>> engine. They know that it has problems and they are working on ways for us,
>>> the Klingon speaking community, to help improve it. The creators want to
>>> make something that produces at least decent Klingon.
>>> Right now they have only done a soft launch so that they can collect inputs
>>> from users, I'm assuming so they can increase the amount of submitted
>>> sentences in their database. At some point in the future they will allow
>>> people like us to login and correct translations. I don't know all the
>>> details yet though. They also hope to open-source the code in the future so
>>> that others can build on it.
>>>
>>> qurgh
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 2:26 AM, Christopher Doty <[email protected]
>>> >wrote:
>>>
>>> > The site linked from the article below is offering to translate your
>>> > English into Klingon and post it to Twitter.  Except that it doesn't
>>> > translate anything.  It just fills in the Klingon word for the English
>>> > word.  With appalling results.  "I want to eat gagh" was rendered by
>>> > it as <jIH neH Daq Sop gagh>.
>>> >
>>> > http://scifiwire.com/2009/12/how-to-tweet-in-klingon-a.php
>>> >
>>> > There is lots of disagreement on this list about various things, but I
>>> > think we can agree on one thing: the locative suffix <-Daq> should
>>> > never be used as a word unto itself, especially to form an infinitive
>>> > (!!).
>>> >
>>> > Chris
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Mark J. Reed <[email protected]>
>
>
>
>






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