I gave a guest lecture this morning on Machine Translation. To keep the talk as entertaining as I was able, last night I wrote a cgi script (that I named Nimrod’s Folly) that takes an input sentence in English, queries Yahoo’s Babelfish web-app to translate it to German, translates the German to French, and the French back to English. The toy isn’t meant to pick on the Babelfish system, which is quite state-of-the-art, it uses that one simply because it has a simple interface that doesn’t print the translation using javascript like Google’s does. Machine translation is a very difficult task, and the state-of-the-art systems suppress dealing with some of the complexity for very good engineering reasons.
Nimrod’s Folly is a variation on the Babelizer java program.
If you find a particularly entertaining sentence, let me know. Getting the students to suggest difficult-to-translate sentences was like pulling teeth.
I may re-write the script to translate everything back into English before translating to a new language, just so that limitations in the French-German dictionary not present in the French-English and German-English dictionaries won’t produce occasional screwy results.
The only thing I would want to know in those languages is the same I ask as english. “I would like a beer”
Unless you’re flirting with the barmaid, you can rely on English to wet your whistle at just about any bar in the world.
I love the little translator thing – Nimrod’s Folly is fun! I can waste so much time at work :) I found that it doesn’t like apostrophes much.
I liked this one: http://liam-moran.com/cgi-bin/nimrod.html?text=If+I+take+a+bunch+of+facebook+status+updates+and+stick+them+in+here+I+wonder+what+would+return.
In my travels thru the america’s and europe one finger raised always means another beer please
Yeah, but which finger?