Brad Mercer
11th July 2007, 06:25 PM (18:25)
The story goes that the early days of creating language translation software were a little rocky. One early attempt did a pretty good job of the rough broad strokes, but was pretty weak in capturing the subtle nuances of language.
In one test of an early Russian/English program, they started with the English Bible text that says: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." The idea was to take that verse and translate it into Russian. Then, completely independently of the original English input, the program was to take the resulting Russian translation and translate it back into English. If the program was ready for marketing the final English result would say: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."
Instead, it came back as: "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."
Brad
In one test of an early Russian/English program, they started with the English Bible text that says: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." The idea was to take that verse and translate it into Russian. Then, completely independently of the original English input, the program was to take the resulting Russian translation and translate it back into English. If the program was ready for marketing the final English result would say: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."
Instead, it came back as: "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."
Brad