A Universal Translator will come in very handy when we finally get off this godforsaken rock.
[QUOTE=Forumaster;38133457]A Universal Translator will come in very handy when we finally get off this godforsaken rock.[/QUOTE]
Yeah so we can talk in the language of space rocks.
How does it do grammar and shit. I always thought you had to get a person to translate because programs just can't do it right.
[QUOTE=Forumaster;38133457]A Universal Translator will come in very handy when we finally get off this godforsaken rock.[/QUOTE]
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP8DzKGf_6E[/media]
[QUOTE=The DooD;38133577]How does it do grammar and shit. I always thought you had to get a person to translate because programs just can't do it right.[/QUOTE]
About as well as google translate.
Where is my babel fish.
[QUOTE=The DooD;38133577]How does it do grammar and shit. I always thought you had to get a person to translate because programs just can't do it right.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=wraithcat;38134324]About as well as google translate.[/QUOTE]
Pretty much this. This has been the foremost problem with machine translations for years. Grammar and context are completely denied to it. It doesn't understand multiple-meaning symbols (present in non-latin languages), and can't piece together context very well. And then with Japanese you get into Katakana and Hiragana and ROMAJI WITH ITS SIXTY DIFFERENT STANDARDS. So sometimes it borrows words from other languages that it'll try to translate them back into, and...
Yeah machine translation of Japanese to Latin languages (English, ho!) is a real mess. Japanese doesn't properly mark names or proper nouns so places tend to be literally translated (i.e. place that [I]means[/I] "Flowery forest" comes out as "forest of flowers" or something). Latin-derived to Latin-derived works much better (i.e. Spanish to French to Italian to Portuguese, or German and English for latin scripts, choose two). Modern machine translation is very much improved, though. Google is pretty much the #1 free translator available now. It's not gonna get you a picture perfect translation, but it will allow you to understand the gist of a sentence. Pretty much all general communications can be carried out nowadays with machine translation and two intelligent fellows. Once you machine translate something, it's simply a matter of inferring the complete meaning. You speak simply and without idioms or metaphors, and you can achieve a very high level of translation. It's never going to be picture perfect, not until we base the computers around the language it's translating, or the language around the computers, but you CAN understand machine translations.
It's fun to translate from one language into another into another into another into another then back to the one you wrote it in to see what you get
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