21.2250, Qs: Auto versus Human Translation Relay Experiment

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LINGUIST List: Vol-21-2250. Tue May 18 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.2250, Qs: Auto versus Human Translation Relay Experiment

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1)
Date: 16-May-2010
From: Sai Emrys < conlangs at saizai.com >
Subject: Auto versus Human Translation Relay Experiment
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 13:42:59
From: Sai Emrys [conlangs at saizai.com]
Subject: Auto versus Human Translation Relay Experiment

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=21-2250.html&submissionid=2634514&topicid=8&msgnumber=1
  


Hello all,

I am running a small experiment - mostly humorous, but it should have 
interesting results nonetheless - comparing an automatic translation 
relay (e.g. http://www.conveythis.com/translation.php) to an equivalent 
one done by actual professional human translators.

This will be published - most likely in the Annals of Improbable 
Research, SpecGram, or the like - and all resulting data will be put 
online.

If you're interested in participating and have done professional 
translation, please email conlangs at saizai.com giving:

1. A list of the directional translations (* see note below) that you do 
(e.g. "English -> French, Spanish, Klingon; Spanish -> Arabic; French   
-> English").

2. (Optional) A single shareable link to your credentials as a 
professional translator (so you can get due credit, and the write-up can 
accurately claim to be doing a reasonable comparison of professional 
vs auto translation).

I'll figure out what chain we can do and email you the text from the 
preceding link. Ideally I'd like to see it go through at least 10 languages 
so there's enough mutation in both to be amusing and interesting.

If you'd be interested in co-authoring a linguistic analysis and have a 
good sense of academic humor, please email me too.

Thanks,
- Sai Emrys
http://saizai.com
http://conlang.org

P.S. If you find this interesting, you may also enjoy the tradition of 
conlang relays, where constructed language authors translate from the 
previous person's constructed language:
http://dedalvs.conlang.org/relay/faq.html
http://wiki.frath.net/Conlang_Relay

* If it's not between English and one of the languages in the following 
list from Google Translate, please also give a link to a bidirectional 
autotranslator for the language pair.

Google Translate List:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, 
Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, 
Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, 
German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, 
Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, 
Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, 
Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, 
Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish 

Linguistic Field(s): Translation




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LINGUIST List: Vol-21-2250