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Quote:

Originally Posted by Ervin Farkas (Post 1484595)

we better help everyone learn English instead of translating.

English is such a silly, stupid, messy chopped up language full of arcane rules and spellings it makes Japanese look easy. Okay, so it has borrowed words from loads of languages, but there are so many subtleties and nuances that can trip people up. And have you ever experienced the tirade of abuse one can receive with a misplaced (aka 'Grocer's') apostrophe? I'm guilty of it myself.

If only it were Dutch that made it as 'the' lingua franca. Or something simple. I'd have been in favour of Esperanto, but always sounded a little odd to my ears...

But I digress. Have been filming and editing a few movies on the topic of networking, and Cisco recently held their big Euro event for networking engineers. The biggest topic was video. Cisco want to 'pwn' video plumbing.

They are almost ready with server-side smarts that analyse incoming video, does machine transcription for later searching, and then providing machine translation for subtitles/closed caption. This is not an 'idea' or a 'prototype', its what Cisco needs to make happen in order to make sense of this strange datatype which has, in the past, been treated like a month old skunk corpse by networking engineers.

It feels like there's other technology being sat on by the likes of these large organisations that do improve on current examples of transcription and translation.

Not surprisingly, the offer to translate comes from English speaking people (talking about this particular thread here), meaning, from what I've read here, from people who don't speak another language. You guys need to understand that there is English, and then there is specialty English. You can bring in the best human translator in the world, if he does not know "multimedia English", he will not be able to accurately translate. Factor in the hundreds of specialty terms used with cameras, NLEs, etc, etc...

At this point, machine translation barely makes it with general, every day language - let alone any specialties.

Translation is a FORM OF ART, not a skill one can easily learn, and pretty much imposible for machines at this point. Over the years I had the chance to listen to translators who were speaking both languages perfectly, yet their translation was horrible. A good translator is born, not educated (of course, skills may and need to be refined).

Machines will never "get there". Here's a poem by the greatest Hungarian poet Petőfi Sándor, very simple words, nothing hard - translated to English by Google.

FÜSTBEMENT PLAN

All the way - home --
I'm thinking:
How do I call
Had not seen my mother?

What will I say first of all
Nice, nice to him?
When that rocking cradles,
The arm extends.

And I thought many
Szebbnél-better idea
While the time seems to stand,
Although the truck was running.

And the little room toppanék ...
Flies up to me with my mother ...
And I csüggtem lips ... silence ...
As the fruit of the tree.

Sounds horrible in English... doesn't it? Now think about what it would look like if you try to translate say embedding metadata or bitrate, color grading, white balance, or AVCHD...

Do you see where I'm going with this? Let's revisit this topic 50 years from today, we may have better options in terms of technology... until then, as I already said, let's just keep it good ole' English.

Just to keep things rolling...........

Here's a free translator that seems good to me-----but don't always trust the gender and singular/plural designations to be correct. These online translators work best if you have enough basic knowledge of a language, to notice the mistakes and be able to correct them. Many of them provide more complicated and often outdated phrasing, than would be used in contemporary conversations. Familiar forms are more commonly used these days with many languages, but the formal versions of verbs and pronouns are most often provided by the translators. When it comes to technical words or phrases, the English versions are often the ones learned and used by speakers of many other languages. In some cases, it might be better to use them in the translations, rather than a word or phrase from the other language, that may have been coined long before camcorders and computers were invented. This doesn't apply to French, of course. There's a government agency to keep that language free of anglicisms. Free Online Translator

Couldn't resist a couple of longish comments

1) A hundred years ago I got tangentially involved in machine translation while I was an undegraduate at Harvard in the Sputnik era (I also worked for the Air Force tracking Spunik 2, but that's a separate story) As you can imagine (or remember if you're old enoug) there was a great and sudden interest in translating Russian technology texts to English and the academic community wasn't shy about getting government research funding for the purpose and teaching courses in it. And I wasn't shy about taking the courses to satisfy some long forgotten course requirement.

The results at the time with the limited computer power we had in the 1950's were pitiful (along the lines of "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" coming out as the Russian equivalent of "wine good, meat rotten")

Disclosure - I don't speak Russian but then again most people working on the project didn't speak it either.

2) Fast forward to 1965 or 1966. I was working in an ad-tech group at IBM and we were trying to build a natural language query system. The impetus for the project, aside from looking for a way to sell more computers was the belief that people would be more capable of extracting information from data bases if they could query in natural language. I was working on the front end, ie the syntactic analyzer and intermediate code generator, which would have been followed by the query engine itself. I also got to run around the country presenting papers on our project at groups like the Association for Computational Linguistics.

It was all great fun and we were sort of able to satisfy a simple query in English, German, or Persian along the lines of "are there any books in our library about mathematics". Interestingly enough, the correct answer would have been "yes" or "no" but we took as an assumption that every query should be answered with some kind of list. I don't remember if we distinguished between books and papers and magazines, or not, but I have the funny feeling that we just lumped them all together.

While it might seem that we might have just been parsing the input for keywords (a la a Google search etc) we were actually doing a fairly sophisticated syntactical analysis of the input stream - which is why we kept getting invited to present papers I think. We also had a bunch of MIT and Harvard grad students in linguistics working with us as part timers.

Anyhow, our conclusion was that what people really wanted wasn't as much the ability to query in natural language as the ability for the computer to read their minds and figure out what they were looking for - they didn't want to take care to disambiguate or precisely state what it was that they wanted in the first place, and if they had to do it anyhow, they were just as happy with a structured way of representing the query.

Another conclusion was that real machine translation was probably an unattainable goal, largely due to (as someone said earlier) the need for disambiguation. And not just disambiguation in the syntactical sense, but also in the much more difficult semantic sense - ie understading not just the syntactic structure of the input stream, but also understanding what a word meant by itself and what it might also mean in the context of the overall discourse, slang, local dialect, social environment, etc etc etc. For example, how should we know that a nice kettle of fish would be one thing if you were in someone's kitchen and a totally different thing if the conversation were about someone who had gotten into a lot of trouble - ie was in a real jam, and not the kind of real jam that you spread on your bread or was maybe participating in a jam session. Or that the meaning of "fine point" would be different if you were discussing a legal issue or knife sharpening.

And this is all in the context of a single language - now exponentiate the difficulty by trying translation - how should the computer know that the appropriate translation of "Thank you" from English to Japanese is in some cases the equivalent of "Excuse me" or maybe silence?

(When someone holds a door or goes out of their way to do something for you it's considered socially appropriate to excuse yourself for causing them trouble - hence the response should be "sumimasen" and not "arigatoh" - unless of course the nice person was in a position where it was their job to open the door for you in which the right response would be to say nothing at all)

Google Translator as I understands it works on the basis of being a statistical translator - ie it searches for an example of the same or similar sentences or phrase in some already translated material - something like "I love you" should be duck soup as it's been translated from and to English and almost every language on Earth and the line appears in almost every romance that has been translated.

But what on earth would it make of "Crush the blacks"? Is this some Apartheid era racial epithet or maybe an admonition to a NZ football team or maybe, just maybe, some obscure techno-speak from a videographer? I ran a test from English to Japanese and the system did a great job of avoiding the issue by just replacing the English "crush" with the phonetic representation in Japanese Katakana and "Blacks" with the characters for "black person"

It also translates "Warm blacks" as meaning nice toasty black people. Haven't tried cool whites yet. By the way it gives differing translations for "Crush" or "crush"

This is very dangerous stuff, particularly if you don't know both source and target languages quite well - in which case why would you bother!

Disclosure: I'm a native English speaker and speak Japanese reasonably well, but not native speaker level, in spite of which it's been my home language for 20 years and a language I use for business nearly every day. Considering that I was almost 50 when I started studying it, I don't feel too bad about not being perfect.

Thank you, Jim....................

An exceedingly well thought out and beautifuly written piece (wish I could be so eloquent).

Wow, you've certainly "got about" in your life.

You make some excellent points and the more of them I'm reading, the less I can reconcile what Google are saying, with the reality of the situation.

The thing that I find staggering is the sheer number of hits this post is getting, it must be hitting a nerve somewhere, somehow, but who is it attracting and why?

Any of those "hitters" want to 'fess up?, or are you lurkers and unable to?

Good reason to sign on boys and girls, and have you're own say on the subject, heck, it's free and the only down side is getting razzed by me when I'm in a grump.

Not really a problem, I'm harmless (don't ask the missus as she'll say "no such thing" but let's not quibble).

Thanks again Jim, that really was just about enough to get your Masters in "Verbal Translation Communications in the 21st Century".

Impressed? Oh yes.

CS

Thanks for the kind words - I spent about 5 years in total chasing this particular bluebird.

By the way, my (Japanese) wife and I also speak Italian for some strange reason or other. There's an interesting expression "In bocca di lupo!" which is literally "in the mouth of the wolf", But it's more common meaning is something like "Good Luck!" and kids use it to wish their peers well in school exams etc. Google does give the correct literal translation, but I think that's seldom what is meant. Similarly the (US at least) expression "Break a leg" seldom literally means what it says, rather it's also an expression for "Good Luck". So maybe a good translation of "Break a leg" would be "In bocca di lupo" and vice versa.

I believe that at some point the feds decided to not fund any more work on machine translation. Not sure about the last 20 or so years as I haven't kept up with it.

Anyhow, our team used to have a weekly contest to see who could come up with the most ambiguous expressions. For example, have you ever seen "Half roasted chicken" on a menu? Does it mean 1/2 of a roasted chicken or a chicken that's only half cooked?

There's a little store here that advertises "Watch batteries while you wait" - but somehow I'd rather watch girls while waiting. Batteries just don't turn me on. Anyone for "assault and battery" by the way - to say nothing of a bunch of big guns also known as a battery. (New York, New York, it's a wonderful town. The Bronx is up and the Battery's down - as in The Battery - used to be the fort where they had the cannons and it's at the southern end of Manhattan)

Once upon a time (Tried running that through Google as well - total disaster) a researcher named (IIRC) Jane Robinson tested the then prevalent assumption that the scientific literature would have many fewer such ambiguities, so she analyzed several articles (again IIRC) in a journal of chemistry. She identified one rather longish sentence that could be interpreted 106 ways if you didn't really understand the subject.

By the way, it isn't just machines that have trouble. When I was working in Japan for a US computer company we had a "small" glitch that took the biggest bank in Japan offline for over a day - not nice! After I endured a half dozen meetings that seemed more like ritual beheadings, I was able to get a VP from the US to come over and explain all the things we were going to do to make the customer happy. It was a BFD (not sure if you can Google that one or not!) so we hired a simultaneous translator for the day of the meeting with the top brass (not sure about that one either). She was fantastic - it was like hearing an echo. Japanese in, English out and vice versa.Very impressive indeed

Everything was going well until the US VP promised that systems engineers from our company would at no charge rewrite the offending software package. At which point I thought WW III was about to break out.

It's quite common in the US for a company (company A) talking to a customer (company B) to refer to the company A sales and support team as "your team" - meaning of course OUR team that is there to support YOU.

Guess how the young lady translated the promise that "YOUR team will work on this at no charge". Yup - she told the bank that their staff would have to fix the problem at no cost to us. Whoops! Sure glad I caught that one before they shot us. As good as she was (which was very very good indeed - I think she had once translated at the UN - she just happened to not know that particular usage of "your"

Damn - you've gotten me started! It's all coming back! I'll be seeing transformational grammars in my dreams!

Try this one (from the NY Times) with your languages of choice.

"Despite the limited rights and the spotty record track record for the largest record deals, Sony is confident it will come out ahead with its Jackson contract."

Just to stir things up a tad...........

Cop this, from this thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/dv-info-...ml#post1509518

I think we may be going International, like it or not.

And at 3.7 k plus hits, this is the second most hit thread on this page, how about that, huh? Amazing. Staggered me.

CS

Hi Chris,
Just translated your opening post to Farsi (Persian) and didn't make much sense. The verbal translation is accurate to a degree, however it fails in the context.

For instance "As an idle, New Years Day thought" was translated to Farsi to mean
به عنوان غیر فعال ، در سال جدید روز فکر

Which means:
As an idel, in the new year's day thought.... this absolutely doesn't make sense.

What is more apalling, is the fact that words are in incorrect order gramatically.

.... and now I translated the above sentence and even that was wrong... not just contextually, but also gramatically.

Google doesn't have Urdu and Pushto translation... so I can only check Farsi.

OK, now, this is getting serious................

5,000 plus hits on this thread and only 49 post's?

Come on, boys and girls, if there's this much interest, there MUST be more comment, surely?

Anyone for anymore?

Speak up.

Come on, lets have it.

CS

Perhaps like a lot of people I often read this forum just as a pleasant diversion rather than with a pressing need for technical advice (though of course as its primary function, it is superb for that and I am eternally grateful for what those who contribute have taught me as someone who began from basis of virtually zero knowledge). Frankly I'm not that exercised about the translation thing but it does make interesting reading and is a change from all the arcane technical talk. I was only motivated to comment by your plea.

Personally I'd like more general discussion about all sorts of non-technical film issues especially around aesthetics, ethics and, er, what's the point of it all?

Hello, Geoffrey.................

I get your point entirely and it is one I have made at various times in the past and is, sort of, part of my push for "Region Specific Codes", which you will find elsewhere on this Forum, tho' it has been mentioned elsewhere as well.

The point of my "plea" (not entirely sure I agree with the description, but we'll move swiftly on) is that this particular thread has had more hits (much to my total amazement) per month than just about any other on the entire site, and it keeps getting hit with monotonous regularity.

Now this raises some interesting questions, for example, the very one you raised - Is this simply an interesting diversion or is this actually of relevance to the hitters themselves?

I don't know, but I suspect (but do not know) that most of the hits are not members and also probably aren't native English speakers to boot, but I have no way of knowing.

The subject IS of interest to me as I'm probably the worst linguist in the known Universe and I am but one member of a huge group that doesn't speak any of the other (insert any figure you like here) odd languages on this planet.

If I could find a way of making this translation stuff work (even at the risk of making the conversation so simple even Google couldn't mangle it) I would.

I'm hamstrung because I suspect most of the hitters aren't members and thus can't post, and they won't join unless they can understand what's being said, the proverbial Catch 22, if ever there was one.

I am consididering writing a short piece, in the simplist English I can muster (and folks, those as know me will be aware that me and "simple" English is an oxymoron) and translating it into the 20 most common languages I can think of, to the effect that if you don't join, you can't post, if you can't post, you have no say, if you have no say, we can't change anything.

What do you think?

Any chance, or am I just blowing smoke here?

The floor is open gents (and, of course, ladies).

CS

I also only speak a pathetic bit of French and German. Your idea is good - why not? It's definitely worth a try. One thing that might go against it - if one doesn't speak a language then why would one be browsing a forum in that language in the first place (I've never done that)? My motivation for joining was to ask a question about something I couldn't solve and at that time one couldn't search the forum for an answer either, without joining - maybe that should be re-instated to get more to join! I found after a while I actually had something to contribute to others' questions (or deludedly thought so).

Sadly, work beckons.

Anon.

Wow, I'm staggered............

at the response to this and it's sister thread here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/dv-info-...s-somehow.html

which are, in effect, the two halves of a torn dollar bill.

Total hits on both to date - 11,592 and they just keep going up at a phenominal rate.

This response alone tells me there is a huge interest in finding some sort of answer to this problem, which is, I believe, contained in that other thread.

I've already said enough so I shan't repeat it, just waving the flag and letting the management know this squeaky hinge isn't going to give up, go away, or, hopefully, die.

Those 11, 592 hits, Chris, are potential members for whom English is a second language (most probably), why not just give them the opportunity of their own language threads and let them get on with it.

The region specific flags idea makes that a walk in the park, and as I have said before, should be sellable and a money spinner for DVinfo to the hundreds or even thousands of other sites using the same software for their forums.

Just thought I'd get this back to the top of the pile for a while, every little bit helps.

Regards,

CS

PS: 11,592! Who'd have thought I could pen anything getting that much interest. Maybe I'm not the useless dork my missus keeps implying I am (just joking).