jueves, junio 14, 2007

Traditore

I have noticed from my hit counter provider that this site have recently been visited and attempted to be translated to English using the Google tool. The result is quite funny as expected, but interesting in some aspects. I am not satisfied with the tone of this blog's name, but the mistranslation is really awful. I would not choose remainder but waste, or trash, or junk to translate "desecho"; it is not about arithmetic but about using and throwing away. I take a lot of care in using diacritical marks and other basic spelling rules when I write in Spanish. Therefore I don't accept things like translating "El" (definite article) as He (pronoun). Get smart, Google developers.

A curious bug is that of translating "Los Andes" (the University), as "The $andes". It evokes an old bad joke about that institution: "Universidad de Los Andes, entidad sinónimo de lucro" ("Los Andes University, profit-synonym entity"). Idioms.

1 comentario:

Lanark dijo...

Ha! It is a rather strange translation, specially at the title. If we were to change the sense, I would have liked "residue" much better. Residue, as in "quadratic residue" or number theory in general.

Anyway, do not expect much from the free translation tools. There is a bunch of very good automatic translators, all of them rather expensive. And the way they work is not a lot more sophisticated than Google's or Babel Fish's, I believe; they mainly have a better training corpus.