Walter Bright wrote:
> Hasan Aljudy wrote:
>> and, interestingly enough, you can now "suggest a better translation" for any piece of text that Google translates! I'm guessing it goes through some sort of filtering mechanism then gets passed to the statistical engine.
>>
>> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/suggest-better-translation.html
> 
> Once again, harnessing the power of crowds!
> 
> I wish they'd do the new translator for the rest of the languages, too.

I'm going over some small things, suggesting translations ..

Unfortunately the suggested translation doesn't show up instead of the messed up one; I'm not sure what they do with the translations that people suggest.

I think it'd be awesome if there was a wiki-like translation system with such ajax powers .. man that would make collaborative translation very fun.


heh .. some translations are so funny ..
"Example: washroom" (yes, wc was translated to washroom!)

The real problem with translating technical papers is that some terms simply have no agreed-upon translation. "Lazy Evaluation" for example .. heck .. I don't know how to translate that! If I was writing an article about it in Arabic, I'd simply leave it untranslated; that's what I've always done with terms that don't have a translation.

Oh, gotta love this one .. "variadic templates"!! I don't even know what variadic means to begin with; how am I gonna translate it? lol! it seems that machine translator doesn't know either; it just transliterated it; it also transliterated "tuples" and "mixins".

"D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code." was translated as:
"Dal static printed, and he collects direct for patriot law"
Where "Dal" is the Arabic letter that makes the "D" sound.

Walter Bright wrote:
> (I once spent time in Japan working on porting software to various Japanese computers. The only tech manuals available were written in Japanese. I don't know more than 10 words of Japanese, but I was amazed at how far I could get in understanding the manuals with just a hint here and there - so I tend to regard even a ludicrously lame google translation as a miracle <g>.)

That's your side of the medal. Since most translation software is made by English-speaking people, translating from some other language to English works better than the reverse.
In my experience the reverse doesn't work at all.

It's not a miracle when "web" is translated as "photoreceptor", or any other funny word. The main D page translated in Italian makes no sense, so it helps no-one having it.

Still, I've made some good laugh with it.

Ciao

Op Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:23:58 +0200
schreef Roberto Mariottini <rmariottini@mail.com>:

> That's your side of the medal. Since most translation software is made by English-speaking people, translating from some other language to English works better than the reverse.

Actually, SYSTRAN is a French company and their software is used for machine-assisted translation in de EU (imagine, here in Europe we have a government level that uses more than 20 official languages that everything has to be translated to and from...).

The problem is, those translations are made by professional translators who use it to assist them where possible, but fix all (or at least most of) the errors made.

Maybe they have a more expensive & better version too; I don't think SYSTRAN wants the EU to start using Google or Babelfish instead of the expensive licensed software that provides SYSTRAN with a consistent income now.  ;-)


-- 
JanC

Op Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:37:26 -0600
schreef Hasan Aljudy <hasan.aljudy@gmail.com>:

> Actually I was looking up "free statistical translation" (or something like that) in Google, when I discovered a Google Blog entry stating that Google now uses a statistical model for translating Arabic and Chinese

Hm, there are open source libraries & tools for doing "statistical translation", e.g.: <http://www.statmt.org/moses/>


-- 
JanC

Roberto Mariottini wrote:
> That's your side of the medal. Since most translation software is made by English-speaking people, translating from some other language to English works better than the reverse.

I can believe that.

> In my experience the reverse doesn't work at all.
> 
> It's not a miracle when "web" is translated as "photoreceptor", or any other funny word. The main D page translated in Italian makes no sense, so it helps no-one having it.

I don't know Italian, but I've worked with German electronics tech stuff auto-translated to English. You quickly figure out that "river" really means "electric current", and "tension" really means "voltage". If your interest is getting your work done, the translators really are an aid.

It's surprising how little of a hint one really needs in order to get the information you need out of a chunk of foreign language text. When I worked with the Japanese tech manuals, not only was there no translation software, the stuff was not even in the roman alphabet, but I was able to crack it by looking at the diagrams and things that are universal, like hex numbers, "RS-232", etc.

Walter Bright wrote:
> I don't know Italian, but I've worked with German electronics tech stuff auto-translated to English. You quickly figure out that "river" really means "electric current", and "tension" really means "voltage". If your interest is getting your work done, the translators really are an aid.

Again, let me not agree.

When you are an Italian programmer, you know what a "bug" is. And even if you are speaking in Italian you call it "bug". And also a "debugger" is called a "debugger".
Having the translator change this key words to "insect" and "adjustment/tuning program" adds only garbage to the nonsense.
And I can also add "template", "thread", "link", "linker" and so on.

Having also the examples "translated" is another big problem.

> It's surprising how little of a hint one really needs in order to get the information you need out of a chunk of foreign language text. When I worked with the Japanese tech manuals, not only was there no translation software, the stuff was not even in the roman alphabet, but I was able to crack it by looking at the diagrams and things that are universal, like hex numbers, "RS-232", etc.

Let me add that an average Italian programmer knows enough English to read programming manuals. Maybe you didn't notice, but none of the most successful IDE has been translated into Italian, and so no Italian documentation has been written for them.

I suggest to revise your English documentation instead: make it simpler and you'll get more non-native speakers.

Another hint: I use automatic translators to ensure they can get right my English. I copy and paste my English text to the translator and see if it can output an acceptable Italian. Often the problem can resolved simply:
 - adding a comma or changing the order of the words
 - using active form instead of passive
 - adding some clarifying "of" or "to" or "that"
 - using a synonym that the translator likes more

For example changing the problematic paragraph:
"D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code. It's multiparadigm: supporting imperative, object oriented, and template metaprogramming styles. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its look and feel is very close to C++'s. For a quick feature comparison, see this comparison of D with C, C++, C# and Java."

To the more easily translatable:
"D is a statically typed programming language, and compiles directly to machine code. It's multiparadigm, supporting many programming styles: imperative, object oriented, and metaprogramming. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its appearance is very similar to that of C++. For a quick comparison of the features, see this comparison of D with C, C++, C# and Java."

Leads to something that is more comprehensible in Italian and French (I'm not sure it's correct English, though).

What I did:
"Native code" was translated as "code [belonging to one by birth]", so I changed it to "machine code".
The second sentence had to be reordered because it was problematic: "styles" was incorrectly associated to "metaprogramming" and "supporting" to "template". "Template" had to be removed: I found no way to get this word right.
"Look and feel" had to be substituted with "appearance" in order to not get "sight and (tactile) sensation".
"Very close to C++'s" had to be reworded as "very similar to that of C++" to not get "near [in space] to C++".

Still, "statically typed" is translated as "statically [type]written". I have no clue on this.

Ciao

Roberto Mariottini wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> Ciao

It could be worse...

<being-silly>

We could always just write everything in RDF: that way machine translators wouldn't have a problem!  And look at how *precise* everything is:

"D is a statically typed programming language, and compiles directly to machine code."

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.digitalmars.com/d/"
xmlns:pl="http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ProgrammingLanguage#">
<pl:type-system>static</pl:type-system>
<pl:compiles-to>native</pl:compiles-to>
...

"It's multiparadigm, supporting many programming styles: imperative, object oriented, and metaprogramming."

<pl:paradigms>
<pl:ParadigmList>
<pl:paradigm>imperative</pl:paradigm>
<pl:paradigm>object-oriented</pl:paradigm>
<pl:paradigm>metaprogramming</pl:paradigm>
</pl:ParadigmList>
</pl:paradigms>
...

</being-silly>

I'm curious as to whether this sort of ambiguity is a problem for other languages?  Is it much easier to translate *to* English than *from* it?

	-- Daniel

-- 
int getRandomNumber()
{
    return 4; // chosen by fair dice roll.
              // guaranteed to be random.
}

http://xkcd.com/

v2sw5+8Yhw5ln4+5pr6OFPma8u6+7Lw4Tm6+7l6+7D i28a2Xs3MSr2e4/6+7t4TNSMb6HTOp5en5g6RAHCP  http://hackerkey.com/

Roberto Mariottini wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> I don't know Italian, but I've worked with German electronics tech stuff auto-translated to English. You quickly figure out that "river" really means "electric current", and "tension" really means "voltage". If your interest is getting your work done, the translators really are an aid.
> 
> Again, let me not agree.
> 
> When you are an Italian programmer, you know what a "bug" is. And even if you are speaking in Italian you call it "bug". And also a "debugger" is called a "debugger".
> Having the translator change this key words to "insect" and "adjustment/tuning program" adds only garbage to the nonsense.
> And I can also add "template", "thread", "link", "linker" and so on.

It certainly would be helpful if there was a way to tag some terms as "don't translate".

> Having also the examples "translated" is another big problem.

I agree. "translated" code samples are just garbage. That's why I asked earlier if there was a way to mark sections as "don't translate". Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way.


>> It's surprising how little of a hint one really needs in order to get the information you need out of a chunk of foreign language text. When I worked with the Japanese tech manuals, not only was there no translation software, the stuff was not even in the roman alphabet, but I was able to crack it by looking at the diagrams and things that are universal, like hex numbers, "RS-232", etc.
> 
> Let me add that an average Italian programmer knows enough English to read programming manuals.

I'm sure that's true of most programmers. But still, there seems to be a demand for foreign language versions of the docs, as a couple people have made the effort to do them.

> Maybe you didn't notice, but none of the most successful IDE has been translated into Italian, and so no Italian documentation has been written for them.

Most of the interest in translations seems to come from spanish, portugese and japanese programmers. I have no idea if this is coincidence or not.

> I suggest to revise your English documentation instead: make it simpler and you'll get more non-native speakers.
> 
> Another hint: I use automatic translators to ensure they can get right my English. I copy and paste my English text to the translator and see if it can output an acceptable Italian. Often the problem can resolved simply:
>  - adding a comma or changing the order of the words
>  - using active form instead of passive
>  - adding some clarifying "of" or "to" or "that"
>  - using a synonym that the translator likes more

That's a great suggestion, but I am nowhere near proficient enough in another language to make this work.

> For example changing the problematic paragraph:
> "D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code. It's multiparadigm: supporting imperative, object oriented, and template metaprogramming styles. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its look and feel is very close to C++'s. For a quick feature comparison, see this comparison of D with C, C++, C# and Java."
> 
> To the more easily translatable:
> "D is a statically typed programming language, and compiles directly to machine code. It's multiparadigm, supporting many programming styles: imperative, object oriented, and metaprogramming. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its appearance is very similar to that of C++. For a quick comparison of the features, see this comparison of D with C, C++, C# and Java."
> 
> Leads to something that is more comprehensible in Italian and French (I'm not sure it's correct English, though).

I'll make the changes.

Walter Bright wrote:
> Roberto Mariottini wrote:
>> For example changing the problematic paragraph:
>> "D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code. It's multiparadigm: supporting imperative, object oriented, and template metaprogramming styles. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its look and feel is very close to C++'s. For a quick feature comparison, see this comparison of D with C, C++, C# and Java."
>>
>> To the more easily translatable:
>> "D is a statically typed programming language, and compiles directly to machine code. It's multiparadigm, supporting many programming styles: imperative, object oriented, and metaprogramming. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its appearance is very similar to that of C++. For a quick comparison of the features, see this comparison of D with C, C++, C# and Java."
>>
>> Leads to something that is more comprehensible in Italian and French (I'm not sure it's correct English, though).
> 
> I'll make the changes.

It might also be somewhat helpful if you could change all or most references to "D" to "The D Language" or something, at least at the beginning of a paragraph.

Hasan Aljudy wrote:
> 
> 
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Roberto Mariottini wrote:
>>> For example changing the problematic paragraph:
>>> "D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code. It's multiparadigm: supporting imperative, object oriented, and template metaprogramming styles. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its look and feel is very close to C++'s. For a quick feature comparison, see this comparison of D with C, C++, C# and Java."
>>>
>>> To the more easily translatable:
>>> "D is a statically typed programming language, and compiles directly to machine code. It's multiparadigm, supporting many programming styles: imperative, object oriented, and metaprogramming. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its appearance is very similar to that of C++. For a quick comparison of the features, see this comparison of D with C, C++, C# and Java."
>>>
>>> Leads to something that is more comprehensible in Italian and French (I'm not sure it's correct English, though).
>>
>> I'll make the changes.
> 
> It might also be somewhat helpful if you could change all or most references to "D" to "The D Language" or something, at least at the beginning of a paragraph.

The problem is it becomes "The D language is a statically typed programming language...", kind of redundant.