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Prevedi.slowwwenia.com does instant Slovene-English translations. Click to try.
I have this reoccurring nightmare that I’ll eventually master
Slovene (say, in 50 years) and that the very next day I’ll turn on the
television and see this:
Anchorman: Well, a stunning development today with huge
implications. Researchers from MIT have developed a device that
instantly and perfectly translates all languages in real time. The machine is small,
fits over one ear, and comes bundled with 4000 languages. One of the people behind this revolutionary new device is
with us in the studio today. Thank you for coming in, professor.
Professor: Thanks for having me, Jim.
Anchorman: What are the implications of your invention?
Professor: Well, there are many implications. First, it means
that people don’t have to learn languages anymore. This device will make
everyone able to speak and understand any language fluently and without any problems.
Anchorman: So, what about all our viewers out there who spent hours and hours
and hours of their lives studying and memorizing how to conjugate verb
and noun forms? Would you say that these people have wasted their time?
Professor: Oh, absolutely. I mean, think of all the wonderful
things they could have been doing instead of grammar exercises: taking hot baths, going to rave concerts, experimenting with drugs. The possibilities are limitless.
Anchorman: What would you say to these foolish people, who so foolishly made fools of themselves for all these years? Should they just go ahead and kill themselves?
Professor: Oh, absolutely, Jim.
* * *
It’s a scary scenario. The only thing that gives me comfort is that, so far, the effort isn’t going too well. This page translates small blocks of text from Slovene into English or from English into Slovene. But like Babel Fish, the results are convoluted at best and incomprehensible at worst. Take for example this quote by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek: (You can listen to him say it here.) (MP3 via Lair105)
"ImaÅ¡ nekega zamorÄ?ka v Afriki, mu daÅ¡ pet dolarjev na mesec in potem dobiÅ¡ enkrat na leto sliko, kako te ima rad. Jasno je, zakaj plaÄ?ujeÅ¡. PlaÄ?ujeÅ¡ ne zato, da bi bilo njemu boljÅ¡e, ampak zato, da ostane - tam."
The proper translation would be something like:
"You have a certain black person in Africa, to whom you donate five dollars a month and who once a year sends you a picture to show you how much he loves you. It’s clear why you’re paying. You’re not paying because you want him to do better, but because you want him to stay — there."
Here’s the machine’s attempt:
"Have a certain zamorÄ?ka in Africa, him come on five dollars on month and after get at last per year picture, how you like. He is eating Jasna, why do you pay. Pay no that is why, that he would be better, but it stays - there." (emphasis mine)
What makes it funny is that it misinterpreted je jasno ("it’s clear") as je Jasno ("eating Jasna" — Jasna being a female name). Of course, that’s the problem with these translators. They can only translate literally without any feeling for content.
The same problem happens in reverse. For example, the English sentence:
"My favorite bands are Smashing Pumpkins, Johnny Cash, and Nine Inch Nails."
Becomes:
"Moji priljubljeni traki so Smashing BuÄ?e, Johnny Gotovinski, in Devet Inch Žeblji."
Maybe I have nothing to worry about after all…
Comments
Comments for this post are closed.
hahahaha
thank you michael.
Funny, I have another URL, but they use the same translator… Instead of nightmares, I’d say it causes headaches.
Tons of fun are to be had from automatic translators, the ones you have to pay for faring not spectacularly better.
(Try a;so to translate the translated text back to Slovenian!)
As for the invention you describe, let me put it this way: compared to it, Arthur Clarke’s orbital elevators and cold fusion are tangible.
Trust me…
(Smashing Pumpkins: Coooool)
You think nowadays translators don’t fit your needs because of the lack of the feeling for content. Okay, predicting the future is something you should avoid, but maybe you shoud be worrying about some things in this context. Why? Have you ever thought that you will be able to search the complete net in only a part of a second? Or that a search engine could have access to your complete correspondence you ever made? desktop.google.com is working on a project called total recal: You will be able to gooogle your desktop. I am not worried about that it will not be possible to put you in the right context and give you YOUR translation.
What you don’t know is that I fed the machine with my translations, because: If everybode spoke Slovene like me it will be easier for me to get around. Hvala za razumevanje.
Johnny Gotovinski. LMAO!
There’s no actual use for these online translators, except for a good laugh. French to English ones are particularly amusing.
Well, I bet at least Jasna is happy. Very happy.
Hm… I think we have a spam problem here. That unsigned post definetly loks like it.
Anyway, translators like in star trek, who instantly translate everything you say correctly are true science fiction. They certanly won’t be around during our lifetimes.
Maby our grand grand grand children will have them.
Untill they’re around we’ll have to stick to the old fashoined method of learning it by ourselves.
Be lucky, you don’t live in japan or china…. Compared to this, Slovene is easy.
While your translation of the quote by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek may be proper and correct, it is also, unfortunately, boring and depressing. The alternate translation you provided via the machine’s attempt, while admittedly incorrect and stupid, is highly entertaining and therefore socially more valuable, as it adds to and invigorates conversation. In these depressing times, humour scores big over accuracy.
English to Japanese, then back again. Using Babelfish. Fun for hours!
“Give a man a fish and he will be fed for a day. Teach a man to use the internet and you will be rid of him for weeks.”
Conclusivly translates to:
“If the fish is given to the person, he is given 1 day. If the person is taught, in order to use Internet, between that of week it is excluded.”
Engrish!
Mobile Speech-to-Speech Translation of Spontaneous Dialogs:
An Overview of the Final Verbmobil System
Verbmobil is a speaker-independent and bidirectional speech-to-speech translation system for spontaneous dialogs in mobile situations. It recognizes spoken input, analyses and translates it, and finally utters the translation. The multilingual system handles dialogs in three business-oriented domains, with context-sensitive translation between three languages (German, English, and Japanese). Since Verbmobil emphasizes the robust processing of spontaneous dialogs, it poses difficult challenges to human language technology, that we discuss in this paper. We present Verbmobil as a hybrid system incorporating both deep and shallow processing schemes. We describe the anatomy of Verbmobil and the functionality of its main components. We discuss Verbmobil’s multi-blackboard architecture that is based on packed representations at all processing stages. These packed representations together with formalisms for underspecification capture the non-determinism in each processing phase, so that the remaining uncertainties can be reduced by linguistic, discourse and domain constraints as soon as they become applicable. We present Verbmobil’s multi-engine approach, eg. its use of five concurrent translation engines: statistical translation, case-based translation, substring-based translation, dialog-act based translation, and semantic transfer. Distinguishing features like the multilingual prosody module and the generation of dialog summaries are highlighted. We conclude that Verbmobil has successfully met the project goals with more than 80% of approximately correct translations and a 90% success rate for dialog tasks.
* has heart attack *
I think this blog is getting a serious spam problem….
where is the spam I havent seen
it
Take a look at the 2 unsigned posts.
oh I get its like advertising
for viagra instead this time its
for this verbmobil. I dont like
spam as its a big time waster
Exactly. It’s even more evil, because it’s disguised as a regular post. It’s only when you read to the end, that you discover, that you have been tricked to read a cleverly put together advertisment message.
Maybe I’m just weird, but I have lived in Japan and to me the language there is much easier than Slovene.
At least as far as speaking goes. We could get into the written part, but that’s just using your memory, if you ask me. Although they do have different ways of speaking according to status, etc, they come *nowhere close* to the Slovenian cases craze. Trust me on that.
I’m still undecided on whether it’s spam. They’re both somewhat related to the post and the majority of comment spam is automated. (And for stupid stuff like pills and porn.)
I actually used to get tons of it until Typepad adopted some very nice technical fixes. It’s gotten much better since then.
I suppose it could be a very cleverly concealed ad, but I don’t think this site gets enough traffic to warrant that much attention. Also, I can’t imagine Google spamming blogs. The verbmobil thing… maybe. Hmm. I’ll have to investigate.
We’ll see. If such unsigned posts continue, we can definetly call it spam. And if the poster of those comments, who obviously must be reading our other comments about his posts doesn’t respond, we can safely assume that it IS spam.
I’m one of authors of Presis translation program and I found your post very interesting.
First of all, it is better to use translator Presis on Amebis site. There is newer version there then on Slowwwenia (1.38 instead of 1.33). Here is current Amebis version of above translation:
You have a certain zamorÄ?ka in Africa, you give him five dollars on month and after get at last per year picture, how he likes you. It is clear, why do you pay. Pay no that is why, that he would be better, but it stays - there.
No more eating Jasna - how boring
Actually Presis does use context in translations to some extent:
Osvojil je to goro. -> He scaled this mountain.
Osvojil je vso državo. -> He occupied all state.
Osvojil je dekle. -> He got to go out with girl.
We are building database of common combinations of verb and noun meanings for such translations.
It is still a very long way to perfect translations (and by then the translator will have to know every music group ever existed, every book or movie title…), but you will find improved version of Presis every month or so.
And you should see machine translations as tool which will help you translating - computer won’t be able to guess right meaning every time and someone will have to choose them. And there will always be depths in languages, which will be lost in machine translation. Machine translation will in time give you right meaning, but subtle submeanings will probably be lost. So - don’t worry.
And by the way: in my opinion Slovenian cases are quite intuitive compared to English articles. But I admit I’m a bit biased being native speaker of Slovenian
Verbmobil seems to be a German-government project. A quick Google search didn’t turn up any blogspam by them, so I’m guessing it’s legit. I’m still thankful for nicjasno’s skepticism, though. I have a hatred for spam that borders on the pathological.
Peter: Many thanks for coming by and for the interesting comment. I can’t imagine how much work a project like yours requires, but I know it can be measured in tons. I suppose it’s safe for me to continue learning Slovene, since I would also need a machine to comprehend Styrian dialects and slang, something that’s probably beyond the most powerful computers on Earth.
I tried to get some curses translated and
it didnt go so good
I”m not sure it translated my favorite curse correctly since I don’t speak the Slovenian language. Just tried it out for kix
On second try with Slowwwenia, same results so I’m not sure it’s better. Well so much for that.