Foreign (non English speaking) Members

[Chris Soucy]

An exceedingly well thought out and beautifuly written piece (wish I could be so eloquent).

Wow, you've certainly "got about" in your life.

You make some excellent points and the more of them I'm reading, the less I can reconcile what Google are saying, with the reality of the situation.

The thing that I find staggering is the sheer number of hits this post is getting, it must be hitting a nerve somewhere, somehow, but who is it attracting and why?

Any of those "hitters" want to 'fess up?, or are you lurkers and unable to?

Good reason to sign on boys and girls, and have you're own say on the subject, heck, it's free and the only down side is getting razzed by me when I'm in a grump.

Not really a problem, I'm harmless (don't ask the missus as she'll say "no such thing" but let's not quibble).

Thanks again Jim, that really was just about enough to get your Masters in "Verbal Translation Communications in the 21st Century".

Impressed? Oh yes.


CS

[Jim Andrada]

Thanks for the kind words - I spent about 5 years in total chasing this particular bluebird.

By the way, my (Japanese) wife and I also speak Italian for some strange reason or other. There's an interesting expression "In bocca di lupo!" which is literally "in the mouth of the wolf", But it's more common meaning is something like "Good Luck!" and kids use it to wish their peers well in school exams etc. Google does give the correct literal translation, but I think that's seldom what is meant. Similarly the (US at least) expression "Break a leg" seldom literally means what it says, rather it's also an expression for "Good Luck". So maybe a good translation of "Break a leg" would be "In bocca di lupo" and vice versa.

I believe that at some point the feds decided to not fund any more work on machine translation. Not sure about the last 20 or so years as I haven't kept up with it.

Anyhow, our team used to have a weekly contest to see who could come up with the most ambiguous expressions. For example, have you ever seen "Half roasted chicken" on a menu? Does it mean 1/2 of a roasted chicken or a chicken that's only half cooked?

There's a little store here that advertises "Watch batteries while you wait" - but somehow I'd rather watch girls while waiting. Batteries just don't turn me on. Anyone for "assault and battery" by the way - to say nothing of a bunch of big guns also known as a battery. (New York, New York, it's a wonderful town. The Bronx is up and the Battery's down - as in The Battery - used to be the fort where they had the cannons and it's at the southern end of Manhattan)

Once upon a time (Tried running that through Google as well - total disaster) a researcher named (IIRC) Jane Robinson tested the then prevalent assumption that the scientific literature would have many fewer such ambiguities, so she analyzed several articles (again IIRC) in a journal of chemistry. She identified one rather longish sentence that could be interpreted 106 ways if you didn't really understand the subject.

By the way, it isn't just machines that have trouble. When I was working in Japan for a US computer company we had a "small" glitch that took the biggest bank in Japan offline for over a day - not nice! After I endured a half dozen meetings that seemed more like ritual beheadings, I was able to get a VP from the US to come over and explain all the things we were going to do to make the customer happy. It was a BFD (not sure if you can Google that one or not!) so we hired a simultaneous translator for the day of the meeting with the top brass (not sure about that one either). She was fantastic - it was like hearing an echo. Japanese in, English out and vice versa.Very impressive indeed

Everything was going well until the US VP promised that systems engineers from our company would at no charge rewrite the offending software package. At which point I thought WW III was about to break out.

It's quite common in the US for a company (company A) talking to a customer (company B) to refer to the company A sales and support team as "your team" - meaning of course OUR team that is there to support YOU.

Guess how the young lady translated the promise that "YOUR team will work on this at no charge". Yup - she told the bank that their staff would have to fix the problem at no cost to us. Whoops! Sure glad I caught that one before they shot us. As good as she was (which was very very good indeed - I think she had once translated at the UN - she just happened to not know that particular usage of "your"

Damn - you've gotten me started! It's all coming back! I'll be seeing transformational grammars in my dreams!

[Jim Andrada]

Try this one (from the NY Times) with your languages of choice.

"Despite the limited rights and the spotty record track record for the largest record deals, Sony is confident it will come out ahead with its Jackson contract."

[Chris Soucy]

Cop this, from this thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/dv-info-...ml#post1509518

I think we may be going International, like it or not.

And at 3.7 k plus hits, this is the second most hit thread on this page, how about that, huh? Amazing. Staggered me.


CS

[Hameed Aabid]

Hi Chris,
Just translated your opening post to Farsi (Persian) and didn't make much sense. The verbal translation is accurate to a degree, however it fails in the context.

For instance "As an idle, New Years Day thought" was translated to Farsi to mean
به عنوان غیر فعال ، در سال جدید روز فکر

Which means:
As an idel, in the new year's day thought.... this absolutely doesn't make sense.

What is more apalling, is the fact that words are in incorrect order gramatically.

.... and now I translated the above sentence and even that was wrong... not just contextually, but also gramatically.

Google doesn't have Urdu and Pushto translation... so I can only check Farsi.

[Chris Soucy]

5,000 plus hits on this thread and only 49 post's?

Come on, boys and girls, if there's this much interest, there MUST be more comment, surely?

Anyone for anymore?

Speak up.

Come on, lets have it.


CS

[Geoffrey Cox]

Perhaps like a lot of people I often read this forum just as a pleasant diversion rather than with a pressing need for technical advice (though of course as its primary function, it is superb for that and I am eternally grateful for what those who contribute have taught me as someone who began from basis of virtually zero knowledge). Frankly I'm not that exercised about the translation thing but it does make interesting reading and is a change from all the arcane technical talk. I was only motivated to comment by your plea.

Personally I'd like more general discussion about all sorts of non-technical film issues especially around aesthetics, ethics and, er, what's the point of it all?

[Chris Soucy]

I get your point entirely and it is one I have made at various times in the past and is, sort of, part of my push for "Region Specific Codes", which you will find elsewhere on this Forum, tho' it has been mentioned elsewhere as well.

The point of my "plea" (not entirely sure I agree with the description, but we'll move swiftly on) is that this particular thread has had more hits (much to my total amazement) per month than just about any other on the entire site, and it keeps getting hit with monotonous regularity.

Now this raises some interesting questions, for example, the very one you raised - Is this simply an interesting diversion or is this actually of relevance to the hitters themselves?

I don't know, but I suspect (but do not know) that most of the hits are not members and also probably aren't native English speakers to boot, but I have no way of knowing.

The subject IS of interest to me as I'm probably the worst linguist in the known Universe and I am but one member of a huge group that doesn't speak any of the other (insert any figure you like here) odd languages on this planet.

If I could find a way of making this translation stuff work (even at the risk of making the conversation so simple even Google couldn't mangle it) I would.

I'm hamstrung because I suspect most of the hitters aren't members and thus can't post, and they won't join unless they can understand what's being said, the proverbial Catch 22, if ever there was one.

I am consididering writing a short piece, in the simplist English I can muster (and folks, those as know me will be aware that me and "simple" English is an oxymoron) and translating it into the 20 most common languages I can think of, to the effect that if you don't join, you can't post, if you can't post, you have no say, if you have no say, we can't change anything.

What do you think?

Any chance, or am I just blowing smoke here?

The floor is open gents (and, of course, ladies).


CS

[Geoffrey Cox]

I also only speak a pathetic bit of French and German. Your idea is good - why not? It's definitely worth a try. One thing that might go against it - if one doesn't speak a language then why would one be browsing a forum in that language in the first place (I've never done that)? My motivation for joining was to ask a question about something I couldn't solve and at that time one couldn't search the forum for an answer either, without joining - maybe that should be re-instated to get more to join! I found after a while I actually had something to contribute to others' questions (or deludedly thought so).

Sadly, work beckons.

Anon.

[Chris Soucy]

at the response to this and it's sister thread here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/dv-info-...s-somehow.html

which are, in effect, the two halves of a torn dollar bill.

Total hits on both to date - 11,592 and they just keep going up at a phenominal rate.

This response alone tells me there is a huge interest in finding some sort of answer to this problem, which is, I believe, contained in that other thread.

I've already said enough so I shan't repeat it, just waving the flag and letting the management know this squeaky hinge isn't going to give up, go away, or, hopefully, die.

Those 11, 592 hits, Chris, are potential members for whom English is a second language (most probably), why not just give them the opportunity of their own language threads and let them get on with it.

The region specific flags idea makes that a walk in the park, and as I have said before, should be sellable and a money spinner for DVinfo to the hundreds or even thousands of other sites using the same software for their forums.

Just thought I'd get this back to the top of the pile for a while, every little bit helps.

Regards,


CS

PS: 11,592! Who'd have thought I could pen anything getting that much interest. Maybe I'm not the useless dork my missus keeps implying I am (just joking).

[Chris Soucy]

Wow, long time, no post.

An interesting snippet to tide things over...............

How Google Translate works - Features, Gadgets & Tech - The Independent


CS

[Chris Soucy]

And yet more about Google Translate..................

Google Translate: Will Google's Computers Understand Languages Better Than Humans? - Slate Magazine

Seems to be just about the only game in town.


CS

PS: 13, 271! Wow.

[Dave Blackhurst]

Methinks there's little hope of "mechanically translating" - heck even the "cross the pond English" often "gets lost" in the wedding event forum... Most time I can make out what those UK blokes are saying, but sometimes even I don't quite get their lingo!

There are so many "local dialects", so much slang/urbanese, and so forth, and thats just ENGLISH! Some parents claim to need a translator to understand their teenagers, and they are FAMILY...

We just have to muddle through as best we can when dealing with other languages - I try using the "auto-translators" on Japanese and other sites, SOMETIMES you can pick up 50-60% of the content, or at least the general context, but without SOME training in the native language, you'll be pretty lost. I do "OK" with Spanish and German, as I sometimes can figure out which words were garbled in translation, and perhaps supply a more suitable word in context.

[Jim Andrada]

If you don't understand the "target" language you won't know when the translator has really screwed up.

I tried a few things English to Japanese - I think I said "crush the blacks" and it produced something along the lines of oppress/subjugate the black people.

[Chris Soucy]

Originally Posted by Jim Andrada

..........."crush the blacks" and it produced something along the lines of oppress/subjugate the black people.

Well, funnilly enough, to just about any English speaking non technical individual, that's exactly what it does mean.

Say it to anyone in Sub Sahara Africa and you'd be lucky to get out of the country alive.

Ditto, in many Western countries you could easilly find yourelf on an "inciting racial hatred" charge, and that's not "small beer".

Put it in the context of "Technical - Digital Video and Photography" and you'd still get some strange looks from those as are not in the know.

Put it into the context of just about any NZ national team playing anywhere on the planet (they are, almost to the point of being rediculous, "something" Black, which really does wear thin after a while) and the saying "crush the Blacks" is valid coinage with opposition supporters.

AFAIK, Google doesn't have a "Technical" language section, probably due to the fact that Digital Video geeks don't have the time or money to indulge in UN style verbal w%^k fests which require translation into 6 different languages and made freely available to all and sundry.

Translating DV manuals (of any sort and usually not actually written in English as we know it in the first place!) is hardly food for general translation of discussions relating to the medium and all it's manifest offshoots.

I think we'll just have to accept, it WILL get there, but the "Technical" section is going to be one heck of a slog, especially when you consider just how many categories it would need to encompass - check out Wikipedia on any tech subject you can think of - how much of that ever gets translated?

I'd still like to do something for our foreign guests and members, if only their own DVinfo space to use THEIR language amongst themselves, but, alas, it still ain't happened and I think it probably never will.


CS