A recent comp.RISKS posting mentions a new machine translation
service accessible through Digital's AltaVista search engine.
See URL:
http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate.cgi?
I know the lurking linguists who read this list will enjoy playing
around with this...if you haven't tried it yet, check it out--it's
very cool. I plug in a phrase :
4. Intelligent Technology: Applying science and technology
creatively to transcend "natural" limits imposed by our
biological heritage, culture, and environment.
...and I get back:
4. Intelligente Technologie: Wissenschaft und Technologie
kreativ anwendend, um " natürliche " Begrenzungen zu
überschreiten, erlegte durch unser biologisches Erbe auf,
züchtet und Klima.
...which ain't bad for a computer, considering the fact that the
input wasn't even a grammatically correct sentence. Revising the
English fragment into sentence form gives slightly better results.
We shall apply science and technology creatively to
transcend "natural" limits imposed by our biological
heritage, culture, and environment.
becomes:
Wir wenden Wissenschaft und Technologie kreativ an, um
" die natürlichen " Begrenzungen zu überschreiten, die
durch unser biologisches Erbe, Kultur und Klima
auferlegt werden.
When you feed the response back and ask for English again, though,
don't be surprised if it's somewhat different from the original.
There are a couple of bugs left to work out <g>.
Still, with a web browser handy I can now grok text in Spanish,
Italian, Portuguese or French, in addition to my native English
and bare-bones German. No word on when the Lojban module is
coming online...
Bartley Troyan
bt26@andrew.cmu.edu