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RE: Google Translator: The Universal Language

Brian Brian [PersonRank 2]

Sunday, May 22, 2005
19 years ago

Philipp this was a great entry. I started typing up a long reply here but decided to blog it instead.

http://www.qwikly.com/blog/2005/05/re-google-translator-universal.html

ardief [PersonRank 1]

19 years ago #

yes, it looks really promising...but there is a problem related to the corpora used to train up the translator: UN documents belong to a restricted language domain, so for ambiguous/polysemous words there is the risk that the translator will always only bring up one translation – the one most used in the UN...

Tim Morley [PersonRank 0]

19 years ago #

Certainly Google are in a better position than almost anyone to create an automatic translation engine – access to millions of stored web pages, dozens of bright, creative engineers – but the translations offered can only ever be as good as the corpora they are built on. At the moment, it sounds as if any and every translation offered by the system is going to sound like a UN press release.

Maybe the best answer is still the one suggested by Dr Zamenhof a little over a century ago – a politically neutral second-language-for-all, one in which people become proficient ten times quicker than they do with English; this way, everyone keeps their native language and thus is still rooted in their home culture, but also has a means of effective communication with anyone else with a different mother tongue, regardless of their origin. Such a system allows communication between equals on an internation level, doing away with the current two-tier system where native English speakers have a natural and perpetual advantage over everyone else, despite the fact that it's everyone else who has to put in the hard work to learn our language.

This is not as hypothetical as many people think, and the original article is right to attribute a certain degree of success to Zamenhof's language. Esperanto has been learnt and spoken continually since 1887, and today has speakers in over a hundred countries around the world. The internet may well "further increase the adoption of English" but it's also a huge boon to the Esperanto-speaking community, not only for communication between existing speakers (through emails, obviously, but also speech – search for Esperanto speakers on Skype and see how many turn up!) but also for helping to teach the language to newcomers – see links below.

In today's world, there's no doubt at all the English is the most widely spoken second language, so if, on your travels, you want to ask the way to the post office, order a hotel room and a couple of beers, or exchange pleasantries with that nice looking person who just smiled at you, then English is most likely to be your best bet. However, if you want to meet people from all backgrounds, in a great many countries around the world, and be able to do more than just buy something from them or smile at them, but actually *talk* to them – talk family, talk politics, talk food, talk music, talk culture... chat, joke, flirt, offend, berate, comfort, advise, as you like – then, from personal experience, I can heartily recommend Esperanto to you.

Links:
Learn basic Esperanto with a tutor: http://www.monda.org/nesto/
Improve your Esperanto for free, with a tutor: http://www.lernu.net/
Read the news in Esperanto: http://www.gxangalo.com/
Le Monde Diplomatique in Esperanto: http://eo.mondediplo.com/

fajro [PersonRank 1]

19 years ago #



see this translator!!!

www.traduku.net

:-)

Adam Steinert [PersonRank 1]

19 years ago #

I'm not sure I would look to a page in Arabic to discover "The White House confirmed the existence of a new Bin Laden tape". "Bin Laden confirmed the existence of a new White House tape", now that would be a story.

Fofy [PersonRank 0]

19 years ago #

Despite Esperanto evangelism, here at my country (Spain) I don't know a single person who knows a single word in Esperanto, I'm afraid. However, I know many that talk english, or french or even german. Esperanto is possibly a good idea, but not very practical nowadays.

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