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
Month: September 2019
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?