TLUG Mailing List

On Fri, 2 Oct 2020 at 11:58, Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com> wrote:

I'm a Facebook refusenik

👍

my nowhere [being] near[ly] as bilingual as me[my] students, [I] can't really live without
Google Translate.

You can always get some off-line translation software.

Commercial translation software costs a bit of money, but it is VAAAAAAAASTLY superior

to Google Translate, which is nothing more than a glorified gibberish generator.

If you are fine with what Google Translate produces, you can always jury-rig your own

in form of a script that performs a dictionary lookup on every word in your source text

and write out a list of all the looked up translations. If you have subject matter knowledge

of the subject of the source text, you can generally make sense of it with a list of

dictionary lookups even if you have no clue what the grammatical structure is.

Google Translate isn't really that much better than a dumb dictionary lookup list.

There is also open source translation software and more and more languages are

supported.

This doesn't support Japanese yet, but you can always contribute the beginnings

of English<->Japanese support

There is also OpenNMT

which is a neural network based translation system, it currently only supports

English, German and Chinese.

I know, your time is limited, so is mine, but if you are up for it and are able to

set aside a bit of your limited time to contribute Japanese support to an open

source translation software, I am quite happy to join in and set aside a bit of

my limited time and perhaps others here are willing to do so as well.

This could also become an interesting subject for a talk at a tech meeting.

Basically, what I am saying is that if we are unhappy with the way things are,

we have to work on alternatives ourselves, and when it comes to software

this is usually easier to do than with many other things.

regards

benjamin

Re: [tlug] OT: Japans digitilization