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Comment Threads

• https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmdNHKbZTHm_KVxqU3-14fODzfFgQbP2-E commented on Lost in Translation
  I'm impressed that machine translation works as well as it does. I can read articles from Al Jazeera (the Arabic site, not the English edition) through Google Translate and the English emitted generally appears to tell logical, comprehensible stories. I originally tried this to see if the Arabic edition was more inflammatory than the (IMO) quite even handed English edition. The answer appeared to be "no." I am especially impressed at Google's translation between a pair of languages without shared ancestry. Usually when I use machine translation I'm trying to extract information about chemistry or allied disciplines from older journal...
• errolwi commented on Lost in Translation
  In my car 'air' and 'ear', discovered when telling my English landlady that I was going to an airshow....
• ilmari.org commented on Lost in Translation
  Yeah, peeing yourself to keep warm works when you're already wet and don't have to worry about the subsequent evaporation cooling....
• scentofviolets commented on Lost in Translation
  @135: How should one write English if one's goal is to avoid mistranslation by simple-minded translation software? Very carefully. This is actually an important, and under-recognised*, task of copy-editors working on scientific and medical journals: the removal of all ambiguity to help avoid unnecessary mistakes resulting from machine translation. That's hard enough to do with human interpreters. I had a counting problem on one of my quizzes about that asked how many three-letter four-digit passwords are there if all three-letter possibilities are allowed except for double-letters. I got a number of answers depending on whether or not 'bab' counted as...
• Charlie Stross commented on Lost in Translation
  My understanding is that the form of words in Farsi that is usually translated into English as "death to ..." has a much more casual, general meaning, and is used where English-speakers would use "down with ..." <sarcasm>I have no idea why western media outlets might pick "death to America!" as a translation instead of "down with America!" -- the two are, after all, utterly indistinguishable sentiments.</sarcasm>...