tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue May 14 16:35:08 2013

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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Bingonese Translator

Rohan Fenwick ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

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<body class='hmmessage'><div dir='ltr'>ghItlhpu' Alex, jatlh:<br>&gt; The Bing Klingon translator went online today. I've tried a few sample<br>&gt; sentences, rudimentary stuff anyone could do with a cursory examination<br>&gt; of TKD.<br>&gt; It needs work.<br><br>net Sovchu'.<br><br>What you have to understand is like most machine translators these days it depends less upon a predetermined set of rules and more upon a database of considered-to-be-grammatical text from which it extrapolates the rules for itself. With languages like French it has titanic quantities of textual evidence from which to do so. Sometimes it still gets it wrong even in a major language like French. Compared to French, Klingon as a language is only a step or two up from having no textual backing at all, and while most of the largest texts are in the Bing engine, many are perhaps not the most ideal for machine translation (Hamlet, while a wonderful text, is a relatively free retelling and so sentence-by-sentence comparisons are often not fruitful - get Bing to translate "Qo'noS" and you'll see what I mean).<br><br>In order to remedy this, I and several other Grammarians have spent the last little while actively participating in the testing and training. We've been madly feeding it specimen sentences as well as monolingual and parallel texts better suited to machine comparisons. Most of the published Klingon texts have been fed into the engine, as well as a wide range of unpublished others. And please don't get the idea that the training has completed just because it's gone live. In response to your "let's hope they get improving", work on such improvement is ongoing and KLI people are about as deeply involved in the process as it's possible to get. All of the issues you raise have already been raised with the folks at Microsoft, and the Grammarians are doing all we can to help them to make the system as good as it can be.<br><br>&gt; Till then, *sigh* expect journalists to come up with "Hov trek 'oH tlhegh ngo'." for "Star Trek is money for old rope."<br><br>Any journalist who relies on a Bing translation for any language, and Klingon is no exception, deserves Rura Penthe.<br><br>QeS<br> 		 	   		  </div></body>
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