On Sun, 2023-05-07 at 17:13 -0700, Samuel Sieb wrote:
Except that they can't be understood. He has already done this
several
times and refuses to accept that whatever method he's using to translate
is completely useless. He keeps saying it's our problem, that we aren't
smart enough to understand his magnificent English.
Wordreference is not very useful for translating. He is so proud that
it gives him multiple possible words, but clearly he's trying to
translate word by word, since it doesn't do more than that. And the
lack of punctuation is extra unhelpful.
Back in high school, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we learnt
Spanish. Though, only to kindergarten level as I would figure out
afterwards. While we learnt the equivalents of some words, forming
sentences was another matter. You had to understand the technique.
e.g. "That's his dog" had no direct translation. Said in Spanish it
was more akin to "the dog which is of him," though the actual words
aren't the same even in that arrangement. It was just a basic
understanding of the syntax.
Machine translation needs to understand the words, the phrasing, and
which words must be used in what context where there's ambiguity and
duplication (in English we have something which is light, which could
be bright, or not heavy, or have less fat or sugar). It needs some
kind of comprehension of the input and output languages. And it can
only have a fighting chance at doing that on a sentence by sentence
basis, since machines rarely "understand" things but recognise patterns
and groups.
Their posts look like "word salad" to me, and I wonder if they're any
more comprehensible in their own language. I also wonder about whether
they're sane, it reads like they're not. They certainly don't seem to
get it that they're outputting nonsense, and continue to do so.
--
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