Another 'living in the future' moment

So I just saw this post in the planet Fedora feed, and by the time-honoured romance language trick of 'all the words probably mean something a bit like a similar word in one of the other languages' decided it was probably interesting. So I fed it to Google Translate, and got a perfectly decent and intelligible translation of the original, with only one or two obviously awkward translations and a single missed word.

This is one of those things you can do and not think much about it, and then you think, holy crap, a computer just translated entirely unknown human writing for me, from one messy, sloppy human language to another messy, sloppy human language. And I could read it. A computer did that. That's pretty nuts. And all it takes is a giant international evil tentacle farm (that's Google), a mind-boggling amount of slurped data for the computer to learn from, and some pretty smart engineering boffins living off whatever organic mulch they're serving in the Google cafeterias this week. boggle

Comments

Cyberax wrote on 2012-10-23 02:28:
Heh. Out of the academic interest I've tried to translate your post into Russian. The result is totally hilarious. However, double translation (English-Russian-English) is pretty good. Looks like Google still needs to work on their linguistic models quite a bit. Maybe being a little bit more evil would help. BTW, Persona login doesn't work.
giallu wrote on 2012-10-23 09:04:
In fact, I am afraid google can translate my post better than I would... :)