Re: [tlug] Free program translates Euro languages to/from English

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

On 11/3/05, Micheal E Cooper <network-admin@example.com> wrote:

> Again true, but to be fair, my first bachelors was in English, and I can
> tell you that literary theory, criticism, and scholarly work on the whole
> is thick with needlessly long, complex sentences the purpose of which is
> 10% to convey meaning and 90% to raise the author in the intellectual
> pecking order.

As a bachelor of Science who almost minored in English Lit, I can
agree. Just not in front of any of my Literature professors...

I find Anthropology to be especially offensive in this regard: there
is important stuff said, but there is plenty of self-important fluff
that makes it *very* hard to swallow. I am not talking about the Ruth
Bennetts of the world here, but a lot of anthropological stuff seems
to fit the bill.

> I really do doubt that we will be able to encode enough context and
> knowledge to make machine translation viable for anything but the most
> basic of communication.

Moore's Law would seem to imply otherwise. 20 years ago, would anyone
believe how much data has been encoded and is available just on the
Internet? Vast databases is the future, and the sky's the limit.

> [T]hey would have to keep
> updating all of this very dense information to keep pace with the changes
> in the language and target culture (maybe a wiki-like thing where users
> correct the system and changes are fed back in?) or design the system to
> read blogs and websites and then update itself (this is sci-fi territory).

This is an AI application if I ever saw one. Sci-fi territory? Maybe
not. After all, isn't Google's spidering and indexing technology a
primitive version of what you describe?

> That having been said, it seems to me that, rather than trying to make a
> system that will translate for you (so that you can fire the translator)
> or an online educ package that will teach for you (so that you can fire
> some teachers), it seems more sensible to focus on creating tools that
> will allow translators and teachers to do what they do better and more
> efficiently.

I think we need both.

> The industrial revolution replaced craftsmen with human assembly lines,
> and then automotive companies replaced the humans with machines. That has
> worked for physical, repetitive tasks, but can AI replace human intellect
> and judgement?

Not entirely, but there are many applications where it can.

For example, if I design a new domain-specific scripting language, I
do not code up a recursive-descent parser for it by hand, I use
lex/yacc (flex/bison for this brave GNU world). If I can describe a
set of classes for an application with some XML, I then generate the
actual implementation code.

So I see technology as constantly enabling us to focus on the more
intellectual tasks, where human creativity is necessary. I think this
will be true of machine translation, as well. Human translators will
be free to focus on great works of literature, etc., and not have to
worry about translating oshirase. :)

-Josh