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Faulty machine translations litter the web
Thread poster: philgoddard
finnword1
finnword1
United States
Local time: 17:55
English to Finnish
+ ...
Legal briefs Jan 29

= judicial underpants in Finnish (according to Google translate)
 
Denis Fesik
Denis Fesik
Local time: 00:55
English to Russian
+ ...
A modulus that can't hold water Jan 31

It takes a couple of seconds to see that a page has been machine-translated and has no value for your research. Again: no value. How can people even argue that it's any good? I agree that some (I'd say the majority of) human translations are no good either, I have to deal with them all the time because my company keeps stepping on the same rake (as people say here) with no-good freelancers and won't listen to my complaints. Thinking about abother thread where the unmessing work done by th... See more
It takes a couple of seconds to see that a page has been machine-translated and has no value for your research. Again: no value. How can people even argue that it's any good? I agree that some (I'd say the majority of) human translations are no good either, I have to deal with them all the time because my company keeps stepping on the same rake (as people say here) with no-good freelancers and won't listen to my complaints. Thinking about abother thread where the unmessing work done by the likes of me gets devalued. There is definitely a trend towards more and more machiney translations, but we should be fighting it, although doomsday wishers will surely say it's permanent. One example I haven't shared here (and I have tons more of them). People who, like me, have to translate site investigation materials should know what Young's elasticity modulus is and that it can be either drained or undrained. If you translate it into Russian, you have to put the participle in a form matching that of the word it is supposed to relate to, so most of the translations out there claim that it is the actual modulus that has been drained—sometime in the past. You can change the participle form to make it mean that the modulus is being drained, but this doesn't solve the problem. Draining and the modulus are not related, it's just a measure of elasticity of a soil specimen where water is allowed to escape from it (I wrote about this feature of English in my post about elliptic language). Maybe someone is at peace with the idea of a modulus being drained (it even occurs in our national standards, which have drastically deteriorated in terms of language quality since they began to adopt international standards by just translating them), but I can't tolerate such nonsence, so I came up with correct translations for my project. Before writing this post, I checked what nine MT engines would think about the modulus thing and was not surprised by their outputs. I have to give credit to deepL though: when I wrote "drained or undrained," it finally came up with a decent translation while the others remained delirious ▲ Collapse


philgoddard
 
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Faulty machine translations litter the web







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