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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (48267)	8/1/1999 11:15:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Steve, when I was an undergraduate at Georgetown U's Institute of Languages and Linguistics, I had a part-time job with a crew of brilliant and wonderfully crazy folks who were working on devising a machine that could do Russian-English translations. No luck, and some years later the funding was cut off. Nobody else has succeeded either. There are just too many problems. For example, how is a translation program to know in what sense "refouler" is used, in the sentence you provided? It can't "understand" context. Of course, there is no excuse for its not understanding things like idioms. They can just be fed into the program. Here are a couple of examples I just tried, from English into French this time. What are you up to? Quels êtes-vous jusqu'à? <snicker> And there is no excuse whatsoever for mangling the plain grammatical sense of this simple question: How else is one to account for it? Combien est autrement on pour le expliquer?<snort> And the program completely falls apart when faced with...ah...colloquial expressions: Nuts to you! You are a big fat dope. Go jump in the lake! Écrous à vous! Vous êtes un grand dopant en graisse. Disparaissent le saut dans le lac! <GUFFAW!> Joan