[AccessD] Selecting Languages - English or Spanish or Something

Wonderful! Thank you so much Arthur.

/gustav

>>> artful at rogers.com 23-11-2004 00:18:16 >>>
1. There are a pair of classic sentences that are used frequently to 
derail machine translators:
a) Bill sent me a bill which I forwarded to Bill.
b) Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
(This one I capitalized to help you through it, although it still takes

some work. To save you the trouble.... there is an English verb, to 
buffalo. It means to baffle, or perhaps to bullshit. As in, when the 
client asked question X, I buffaloed her. A particular variation on
said 
action is known as the Buffalo buffalo. This is a version particular to

the city -- as opposed to say the New Orleans buffalo. So, certain 
buffalo who happen to reside in Buffalo do the Buffalo buffalo to other

buffalo who also happen to reside in Buffalo.)

There are many other variants on this problem, and to give my source 
credit they can be found in Steve Pinker's classic book "The Language 
Instinct". (For those unfamiliar with it and who also happen to wonder

what the hell Noam Chomsky was on about, said book contains the most 
concise explication of Noam's basic theory that I have ever read.) Here

are a few more nuggets for your translation-machine:

Deer Kill 180,000
Queen Mary Having Bottom Scraped

And of course, the old saw, from Marx (Groucho not Karl), "Time flies 
like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

An even more remarkable one, also courtesty Mr. Pinker.... here are 2 
sentences, each spoken by a different person (presumably married to
each 
other):

a. I'm leaving you.
b. Who is he?

This one is my favourite. The other ambiguities are resoluble by
parsing 
the sentence in question carefully. But this latter is remarkable in
that:
a) none of the words assembled convey a larger meaning (as is the case,

for example, in "The New York Yankees").
b) all of the words assembled convey no inherent meaning (you have to 
assume a HUGE amount of cultural baggage in order to interpret this 
conversation; further, you have to assume certain mores, certain 
cultural perspectives, certain sexual preferences and so on, in order
to 
make any sense of this snippet of conversation -- i.e. regardless of
the 
gender of A, we can deduce that A is only interested in males, but that

may be a faulty deduction; A could be bisexual and B unaware of this;
it 
is also possible that A is leaving B not for someone else but simply 
because living with B is intolerable; and so on). IOW, virtually NONE
of 
the meat in this conversation is contained either in the individual 
words or in their assemblage; ALL of the meaning is contained in the 
minds (and by extension the cultures) of the speakers.

I have a lot of European friends, and almost all of them have commented

at one time or another on the elasticity of English. Consider the word

"fuck". It can be used in so many ways that it boggles the minds of 
newcomers to the English language. I fucked a lovely woman last night.
I 
fucked a business competitor this morning. I tried to repair my 
motorcycle but fucked it up. Fuck you! Fuck that! Fuck you and the
horse 
you rode in on. Fuck me. And so on.

There's a common (and I might add falacious) maxim that the Inuit have

28 words for snow. This is true only in the sense that we have 100
words 
for cigarette or automobile (Honda Prelude, Dodge Caravan, etc.) The 
example cited above is the opposite phenomenon, as exemplified by 
another old riddle: Why is making love in a canoe like drinking 
Budweiser? Because it's fucking close to water.

Insofar as writing remains utterly ambiguous (a pretty tough 
proposition, but let's let that pass), then translation-engines have a

slim chance of accuracy. To the extent that language is a joy, a thing

to be savoured, played with, caressed, teased and fondled, then 
machine-translation has virtually no chance of success. If we go no 
further than translating "File | Open..." then we may be safe; ditto
for 
various error messages.... but even there, I have to point out that
once 
I taught a course, one of whose students was confined to a wheelchair,

and when a message came up saying something like "Invalid parameter", 
she said, "I'm an invalid." Which in turn led me to consider what a 
horrid word that was to describe people in her condition. Such persons

are not invalid; they are just as valid as you and me.

Yet another example. A close friend and colleague of mine, from
Britain, 
gave me a copy of his new software to test. A couple of days later he 
asked me what I thought of it. I replied, "Not bad!". In Canada this is

a compliment. In Britain this means that I couldn't find anything truly

despicable to say about it, but was overall underwhelmed. His look of 
shock make me realize a cultural gap here of serious proportions.

Chevrolet at one point release an automobile called "Nova". In Spanish

this means "Does not go." (Neuve is the word for New.)

All of which goes to say, do not trust translation-machines. If you
need 
to translate, find a human.

One final example, taken from the annals of machine-translation 
literature. They had an English to Russian translator and its opposite.

They fed in an English sentence, translated it to Russian, and then 
translated it back.

a) The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
b) The vodka is good but the meat is rotten.

Arthur