OBSTACLES BEHIND COMPUTER TRANSLATIONS

The system of communication we call language is very complex and very arbitrary. Efforts to tame it, to break it in, are doomed to failure because language is a community effort, and every speaker, and writer, uses it according to personal, cultural, educational and stylistic idiosyncrasies. Dean Alford, The Queen’s English, put it like this: “Neither grammar nor rule governs the idiom of a people.”
Several obstacles hinder translation software from being acceptable:
Polysemy –multiple meanings of a word- is not yet understood by computer software. The ambiguities of meaning are still beyond any software in the market. “Vela” can both be a “candle” or a “sail”. “Quemaron las velas”, they burned the sails is translated as “candles burned.”
Punctuation: This very important part of the written language presents almost an insurmountable obstacle for the machine translator: “Y gritando que no la mató, se fue” is nonsensically translated as: “And screaming that he killed her, it was.” If we switch the comma “Y gritando que no, la mató y se fue” we get another piece of nonsense “And screaming that he killed and left.”
If we bait the machine translator with the famous definition of a Panda’s eating habits: “eats shoots and leaves” we get “come brotes y hojas”, which is pretty good. However, if we add the well-known comma, turning the Panda into a cowboy: “eats, shoots and leaves” the result is “come, brotes y hojas” unaware of what the comma has done to the original sentence.
Syntax is beyond the understanding of computer translators which fail to comprehend the complexities of Spanish word order. Let us consider the old Palindrome: “Dábale arroz a la zorra el abad”, which can be read backwards. Google gives us: “Rice to the fox gave him to the abbot” which makes perfect sense to someone who speaks no English.
If we simplify the sentence, and ruin the palindrome, “El abad le daba arroz a la zorra” then we get a good rendering: “The abbot gave rice to the fox.”
Faulty originals. As language is the personal property of each speaker, we will find all types of faulty or complicated originals to translate. Not all those who wield a pen know how to express their ideas flawlessly.

Read the rest:voxxi. com Delfin Carbonell