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My prediction is that sooner or later, this will all be moot. Babelfish or Google Translate will get so good that you'll be able to read any webpage you want. 20 years from now, some dude somewhere will create a site in a Native American dialect that only 20 people in the world speak, and you'll still be able to read it.
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@Bigdamnhero: Really?
As someone who speaks three languages, and is working on their fourth, I can tell you there are certain things about language you just cannot program into a machine. I'm talking about the very basic words with multiple meanings that are different from the multiple meanings held by other words in other languages. That's if the meaning can be translated, which it sometimes cannot.
Once you start going deeper into it, you start getting idioms, colloquialisms and metaphors. Babelfish has hardly improved at all in the last 10 years, and there's a reason for that. Reply
As someone who speaks three languages, and is working on their fourth, I can tell you there are certain things about language you just cannot program into a machine. I'm talking about the very basic words with multiple meanings that are different from the multiple meanings held by other words in other languages. That's if the meaning can be translated, which it sometimes cannot.
Once you start going deeper into it, you start getting idioms, colloquialisms and metaphors. Babelfish has hardly improved at all in the last 10 years, and there's a reason for that. Reply
@Paul_Is_Drunk: If humans can do it, a computer could do it- eventually. There's nothing inherently impossible about natural language processing. It's very hard- just ask the natural world. It took how many billions of years for nature to evolve machines capable of using language? We've been at it for a fraction of the time: I'd say we've been quite successful.
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@Paul_Is_Drunk: But Google Translate is now remarkably better than Babelfish, IMO. We have a long way to go, but it does an amazing job on some things now.
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@Paul_Is_Drunk: I know what you mean. I have challenged my students to show me any translation engine that will take a Shakespeare soliloquy, translate it into a foreign language and then return an English translation which makes ANY sense at all. It's quite an amusing exercise... There's a reason the world is speaking fewer languages every year, and it's not the flawless translation of Babelfish or Google.
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@Cory Gross: 'and the secret ingredient is.... Love?!
'Ok, who has been screwing with this thing?'
~ Dr. John Frink. Reply
'Ok, who has been screwing with this thing?'
~ Dr. John Frink. Reply
@foolish-rain: You seem to be presupposing that 1) the soliloquy makes sense in the first place, and more importantly 2) that the soliloquy is in English.
1 is (mostly) me being snarky, but 2 is most definitely false. Shakespeare did not speak English as we define it. Reply
1 is (mostly) me being snarky, but 2 is most definitely false. Shakespeare did not speak English as we define it. Reply