Henri, I hope you didn't take my reply too seriously. I'm sure my
French is much worse than your English. I just felt that a sentiment
such as "simple languages such as English into more complex and subtle
languages such as French" deserved a friendly rejoinder.
I have worked on speech recognition and natural language understanding
and have been suprised by the power of statistical methods. CMU has
been a leader in language processing, so I expect that their CMU
Statistical Machine Translation will continue to improve. Getting it
into the hands of more users is a good way to facilitate that.
Mike
Henri Beauchamp wrote:
I never said it was a bad example of user-ran project neither that the
request for feedback on this list was a bad idea.
I simply said it was pretty doomed to failure because of the poor
(and actually pitiful) results returned by the automatic translators
it is relying on.
...
My point was not about simple mistakes, such as using the wrong pronoum
and/or gender, but about the very meaning of the translated text (which
can become right out the opposite of what the original text was all about),
something automatic translators are very prone to produce.
...
It is good enough to clearly express my thoughts and avoid misunderstandings,
which is really all what I care about. I don't pretend writing a perfect and
100% grammatically correct English, but if I were to write this very email
in French and then run it through an automatic translator before sending it
on this list, my guess is that you won't understand a single thing...
However, judging someone's skills, based on an email they wrote in five
minutes and did not re-read, is not very reliable a method...
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