Another 'living in the future' moment

Source

So I just saw this post in the planet Fedora feed, and by the time-honoured romance language trick of 'all the words probably mean something a bit like a similar word in one of the other languages' decided it was probably interesting. So I fed it to Google Translate, and got a perfectly decent and intelligible translation of the original, with only one or two obviously awkward translations and a single missed word. This is one of those things you can do and not think much about it, and then you think, holy crap, a computer just translated entirely unknown human writing for me, from one messy, sloppy human language to another messy, sloppy human language. And I could read it. A computer did that. That's pretty nuts. And all it takes is a giant international evil tentacle farm (that's Google), a mind-boggling amount of slurped data for the computer to learn from, and some pretty smart engineering boffins living off whatever organic mulch they're serving in the Google cafeterias this week. *boggle*

Comments

Cyberax wrote on 2012-10-23 02:28:
Heh. Out of the academic interest I've tried to translate your post into Russian. The result is totally hilarious. However, double translation (English-Russian-English) is pretty good. Looks like Google still needs to work on their linguistic models quite a bit. Maybe being a little bit more evil would help. BTW, Persona login doesn't work.
giallu wrote on 2012-10-23 09:04:
In fact, I am afraid google can translate my post better than I would... :)