{"id":429839,"date":"2010-03-15T13:20:26","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T17:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kempton.wordpress.com\/?p=10444"},"modified":"2010-03-15T13:20:26","modified_gmt":"2010-03-15T17:20:26","slug":"human-and-computer-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/429839","title":{"rendered":"Human and computer translation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From The Economist, “The many voices of the web – The internet: New combinations of human and computer translation are making web pages available in foreign languages<\/a><\/strong>“. The following is an excerpt (emphasis added),<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

“This fantasy is still just that, but bits of it are starting to look plausible. Start with the translation part. Thanks to the internet, this is now a relatively flexible and cheap process. At the base of the translation hierarchy are free services offered by Google and others. <\/em>Such services \u201clearn\u201d by analysing collections of documents that have been translated by humans, such as the records of the European Parliament, which are translated into 11 different languages.<\/em><\/strong> These collections are so big, and the machines that analyse them so powerful, that automatic translation (known in the jargon as \u201cmachine translation\u201d) can usually convey the gist of a text, albeit it in a slightly garbled manner. Google and its rivals focus on widely spoken tongues, but academics are working on machine-translation services for more obscure languages.<\/p>\n

An army of volunteer translators occupies the next level up in the hierarchy. Several prominent English-language publications, including this newspaper, are regularly translated into Mandarin by groups of unpaid volunteers for the benefit of other readers (see ecocn.org\/bbs). More formal projects also exist.<\/em><\/strong> <\/span>At Global Voices, a kind of polyglot bloggers\u2019 collective, around 200 volunteers select and translate their colleagues\u2019 posts. Items on Meedan, a social network dedicated to the discussion of Middle East news, are translated into English or Arabic by machine and can then be tidied up by readers.<\/p>\n

Paid human translators, unsurprisingly, still produce the best results. But even here costs are coming down, as the translation industry is shifting from project-based to piecemeal working. […]<\/p>\n

So how much closer is the dream of a unified web? Volunteer translators only cluster around popular sites, so the vast majority of blogs will remain untranslated, or only machine-translated. Most content producers are unable to pay for human translation, even at today\u2019s prices. That leaves them reliant on machine translation, too. It is getting better, but it still struggles with colloquialisms and idioms. As Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices and a researcher at Harvard University, puts it: \u201cIf you sound like an EU parliamentarian, we can translate you quite well.\u201d Until computers learn how to cope just as proficiently with the outbursts of self-absorbed teenage bloggers or snarky gossip columnists, machine-translated articles will struggle to attract readers. Clever technology can help lower the web\u2019s linguistic barriers, but cannot yet eliminate them.<\/em><\/strong>“<\/p>\n

Filed under: Internet<\/a>, people<\/a>, World<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The Economist, “The many voices of the web – The internet: New combinations of human and computer translation are making web pages available in foreign languages“. The following is an excerpt (emphasis added), “This fantasy is still just that, but bits of it are starting to look plausible. Start with the translation part. Thanks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":841,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-429839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/841"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}