On Wednesday, November 28, 2001, at 05:46 , Mark Rollins wrote:
> Just use www.babelfish.altavista.com, and yoiu get the following:
>
> When inserting the Mincho font in the MessagePad 2100 which operates
> with the English system, Japanese information tofu letter (letter
> prevents
> the fact that) it stops transforming in indication below.
>
> Isn't that helpful?!
:-) :-) :-)
Those automatic translators are cute aren't they ?
They produce quite reasonable results when translating between languages
with a common root, i.e. Indo-European languages, but if you cross that
line it often fails spectatcularly.
I have tried out various translators that promise to translate English
web sites inside your browser into Japanese on the fly and it was always
very amusing to see the translation. Better than any comedy show!
Although, I haven't heard the expression "tofumoji" before and that may
well be a creation of the author of the page as he felt it was necessary
to put "mojibake" in parentheses right behind it. "Mojibake" is a very
common Japanese expression for garbled text and I am surprised that
Babelfish didn't pick up on that at all.
I remember a story about evaluating a professional Japanese to English
translation package back in 1996. A newspaper article which said that
Prime minister Hata had left that morning on a special flight from
Haneda airport was used as input. This was too much for the software to
cope with ...
Hata, the name of the prime minister is "wing" + "paddy".
Haneda, the name of Tokyo's domestic airport is "feather" + "paddy"
Airport is "sky" + "port"
Special flight is "special" + "container"
There was just too much bird stuff (wings, feather, sky) and agriculture
(paddies) in the sentence for the software to not get confused and the
word container must have wacked it completely off course.
I seem to remember it didn't even get "prime minister" right, probably
omitted due to second guessing the many bird items. The only thing that
was translated properly was "this morning" and anything else turned into
some mystical feathered wing bird taking to the skies from a field in a
special container
or something like that.
Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact outcome, but it was hilarious.
What I do remember is that we couldn't stop laughing about it again and
again for weeks ;-)
I think this was in an article in an English language magazine called
Japan Computing, you might even find it on the web somewhere.
rgds
BK
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