Some people seem to think (see this post) that a really great machine-translation program would be able to “handle complicated multilingual puns with ease.” But what is a “multilingual pun” anyway? The prefix “multi” implies more than two, and honestly, off the top of my head I can’t think of any puns involving more than… Continue reading Interlingual puns
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Homeless in Vienna
Vienna has once again been ranked the world’s best city to live in. Apparently it’s won the Mercer Quality of Living Survey 10 years in a row and from what I saw on my last visit there, I’d say the honor is well-deserved. But Vienna hasn’t always been such a great place to live. In… Continue reading Homeless in Vienna
Puns and jokes
In this post I promised to go through some pun-translation strategies. What makes puns hard to translate is that there is almost never one “right” or “best” solution. Puns give rise to several different scenarios: 1. You just translate the straight meaning and write a footnote about how it was a pun in the source… Continue reading Puns and jokes
That’s pathetic
Here’s the start of a German sentence I’m working on right now: Die überwältigende Musik in Kombination mit kurzen, pathetisch vorgetragenen Deklarationen von hehren Zielen … And here’s how the best free machine translator renders it into English: The overwhelming music combined with short, pathetic declarations of noble goals … But according to dict.cc, “pathetisch”… Continue reading That’s pathetic
How good can MT get?
Over at Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander has a good post about the future of AI, but I need to nitpick these speculations about what a “future superintelligent Google Translate” could do: For example, take Google Translate. A future superintelligent Google Translate would be able to translate texts faster and better than any human translator,… Continue reading How good can MT get?
Find the difference
People tend to think of machine-translation post editing as “easier” than old-fashioned translation. But I’ve come to think of MTPE not as easier than traditional translation, but as requiring a different set of skills. Namely, the same skills required by find-the-difference puzzles. Find-the-difference puzzles vary in difficulty, of course, just as MT jobs do. You… Continue reading Find the difference
The Black Spider
And why not do evil that good may come? – as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just. (Romans 3:8) Die schwarze Spinne is an unsettling tale that dramatizes the terrible consequences of moral cowardice. The author, Swiss pastor Albert Bitzius (1797-1854), wrote under the pious pen name of Jeremias Gotthelf.… Continue reading The Black Spider
What the Internet is for
Did you know the Internet was not actually created in order to drive people insane and make them hate each other? It’s true. Back in the nineties, most of us thought of the Internet as a bigger, better version of your local library. It was a research tool with the additional perk of email. Plus… Continue reading What the Internet is for
Deitsch at the pharmacy
I was pleased to see that my local pharmacy offers interpreting services not only to speakers of run-of-the-mill Deutsch but also to speakers of “Deitsch,” i.e. Pennsylvania Dutch:
Does Yoda use German syntax?
Long, long ago, I read a list of rules for a Star Wars drinking game. “Take a drink every time Yoda speaks in German syntax,” it decreed. But how often does Yoda actually use German syntax? Let’s go through some of his words of wisdom and see how many drinks that rule would get us,… Continue reading Does Yoda use German syntax?