Re: Babelfish

Lanarcam wrote:
Tommy a écrit :

Does anyone know of a webpage or something showing translations put into
machine translators like Babelfish that can't be translated correctly?


Assuming you want something which proves the impossibility
of a fully automatic translation, there is this one:

"Bar-Hillel had become convinced that FAHQT was unattainable
“not only in the near future but altogether”. It was in fact
a view he had expressed in his 1951 review (ch.2.4.2), before
most MT projects had even been thought of. Now in 1959 he felt
able to give a ‘proof’ in ‘A demonstration of the non-feasibility
of fully automatic, high quality translation’ (Appendix III
in Bar-Hillel 1960). His argument was based on the short sentence:

The box was in the pen

in the context:

Little John was looking for his toy box. Finally, he found it. The
box was in the pen. John was very happy.

On the assumption that pen can have two meanings, a ‘writing utensil’
and an ‘enclosure where small children can play’, Bar-Hillel claimed
that “no existing or imaginable program will enable an electronic
computer to determine that the word pen in the given sentence within
the given context has the second of the above meanings.”

<http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/WJHutchins/PPF-8.pdf>

Hallo,
sorry, I don't get it.
I am neither a computer nor a programmer. Therefore my thoughts are
probably all too human.
But when I read the sentence "The box was in the pen" I wondered at
once: "How can a *box* be in a *pen*? Either the word "box" or the word
"pen" (or both) must have an unusual meaning here." I must confess that
I did not know the second meaning of pen, but if I had looked at a
dictionary list of all possible meanings of "box" and "pen", and a
computer program should be able to do that, I cannot believe that it
should be impossible to separate this and other possible meaningful
explanations from the obviously meaningless explanations.
Actually, IMHO it is much more difficult to find out which art of box is
meant here without the reference to Little John and his toy box.

Regards,
Sergio Parimbelli




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