I have tried several different online translators at times, and I have found some interesting effects. Today, for example I was playing with the Google translator between English and Latin, and had the following exchange:
"The air in here is really stale." was translated as "Caeli in hic est vere veteris."
I then had the translator work from Latin to English, and found the following:
"Caeli in hic est vere veteris." was translated into "This is indeed the heaven in the Old Testament."
I have several reactions:
First, I seem to remember my high school Latin teachers implying that Latin was very precise, and was surprised at the differences in the translations.
Second, if there really is this much variability, it is no wonder that reading or translating a magical text in ArM takes an entire season!
Finally, does anyone have a favorite (and possibly more accurate) translator website?
:mrgreen:
That´s a truly superior example of something i´ve had happen many times. Try translating it back and forth a few times more.
One more round of translation ended up with "Quod quidem in veteri caelum" which then turned into "Hoc est caelum in veteris" which seems to be the end station, so your text in English ends up as "This is heaven in the Old".
Quite hilarious i must say.
Oh you can get MUCH worse results with some other languages. Still, it´s surprising that it did manage to mangle it so badly via latin. Part of it though is that users can change which word is to be the preferred translation, and it doesn´t handle context well at all. So, the words might be correct in the context they were entered with, but give crazy results for the next text entered.
I´ve done dozens of corrections for Swe-Eng, but thats barely a molemound compared to the galaxy of planets needing fixing.
My real-life experience with automatic tells me that online-translations tend to point you in the wrong direction.
Unless they end up in hilarious gibberish.
Which is not surprising. How could a computer interpret puns and the like? That's difficult even for human translators...
Except those translating disc-world-stories apparently.
Yeah, google can be funny... always use lower-caps too. For some reason it doesn't identify some words or sentences if you capitalize the first letter of the first word or in subsequent words.
