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Translation Option

Posted: 12 Feb 2006, 07:03
by PsychoBob
How about an option which allows the user to set two options: their language and if they wish the chat to be translated.

Translated chat would be slower, but could conceivably be rendered through someling like Babel Fish (http://babel.altavista.com/) by parsing the output page. In the game it could be diaplyed like:

Original Chat Message (Ursprüngliche Schwätzchen-Anzeige)

Where the portion in brackets is the translation. There are a lot of great translation pages, of course they aren't accurate, but it may be easier than trying to guess...

PB

Posted: 12 Feb 2006, 09:37
by Matt
Well somebody here in this forum had the same idea and crush pointed out why thats bullshit.

Re: Translation Option

Posted: 12 Feb 2006, 15:33
by Pajarico
PsychoBob wrote:How about an option which allows the user to set two options: their language and if they wish the chat to be translated.

Translated chat would be slower, but could conceivably be rendered through someling like Babel Fish (http://babel.altavista.com/) by parsing the output page. In the game it could be diaplyed like:

Original Chat Message (Ursprüngliche Schwätzchen-Anzeige)

Where the portion in brackets is the translation. There are a lot of great translation pages, of course they aren't accurate, but it may be easier than trying to guess...

PB
There are not a single system right now capable of doing understandable contextual translations, let alone simultaneously.

Posted: 12 Feb 2006, 17:26
by Crush
all the attempts to create an automatic translation program fail because one premise isn't met.

creating a useable translation requires understanding of the source text.

there isn't a computer program yet that can really understand human language. to understand a text it isn't sufficient to just look up the meaning of every single word in a dictionary. analysing the grammar is the next step but the information optained by this step is still far away from really understanding the intention of the sentence. to really understand what a sentence means its information has to be pictured in the mind. a task computers aren't cpable of, yet.

Posted: 12 Feb 2006, 19:02
by Modanung
Plus in a game (or whilst whatever chatting session) people type using slang, 'hacker'-language, informal abreviations and they make typos and grammar errors.
This makes it ever harder to translate a chat conversation then an article by a professional reporter or whatever. And even the latter cannot be translated flawless by a machine until today.

Posted: 14 Feb 2006, 01:51
by PsychoBob
creating a useable translation requires understanding of the source text.
I understand that, but even if the translation is not completely coherent the human mind can generally pick out what is pertinent, targeting on only the important words, such as 'leather shirt', 'trade', 'sell', 'free', 'help', etc. Whether the entire sentence is grasped or translated properly isn't the issue as much as if the key concepts were translated properly. As an example, using BabelFish at the URL I originally posted, saying 'Hey man! How are you doing? Can you help me get the leather shirt?' is translated to 'He Mann! Wie tun Sie? Können Sie mir helfen, das lederne Hemd zu erhalten?". Although it's definitely not perfection, there is enough information there to figure out what the original message meant to say.
There are not a single system right now capable of doing understandable contextual translations, let alone simultaneously.
For what it's worth, the server would not have to simultaneously translate, you do it client side by pushing the chat text to a web based translation engine that handles conversion between language a and language b - there are hundreds of them - you would not be able to handle all languages to all languages, but you could handle many such as Spanish to German, French to English, etc. As far as understandable, you give the brain too little credit. In your favor there is, of course, 'All your base are belong to us', but that is understandable, simply not grammatically correct.
Plus in a game (or whilst whatever chatting session) people type using slang, 'hacker'-language, informal abreviations and they make typos and grammar errors.
Modanung's argument is the one that I will concede to :oops: . Spelling, abbreviations, typos and slang would be the Achilles heal. Thanks for pointing that out, I hadn't thought of that.

PB

Posted: 14 Feb 2006, 02:10
by Platyna
Automatic translations are tricky. I know quite alot of phrases which literally means the same, in various languages. but are usually used in a different meaning, for example the same phrases in one language it can be coarse term for a sexual activity while in other they are used as an elegant and poetic expression how one is sure about their theory, so you should underestand now how an automatic translation can be ambiguous and may cause problems within the community.

Regards.

Posted: 14 Feb 2006, 14:36
by Pajarico
For what it's worth, the server would not have to simultaneously translate
I didn't say so. No matter if it is client-side or server-side translation, you still need simultaneous traslation, or at least kinda fast. There are also the other problems pointed by my forum pals.
Is not to being a naysayer :D, is just that it can't be done, don't insist, seriously.