30.3542, Media: Teach You Backwards

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-3542. Fri Sep 20 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.3542, Media: Teach You Backwards

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Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2019 05:28:27
From: Martin Benjamin [martin at kamusi.org]
Subject: Teach You Backwards

 
This book, free at http://teachyoubackwards.com, tells the story of Google
Translate, the world’s most-used service to convert words among languages.
Google claims to serve 103 languages, but nobody has ever before investigated
what actually happens when you put in text for translation. Sometimes your
results will be spot-on, sometimes they’re spotty at best, and sometimes
they’re as intelligible as a red-spotted toad. What are those times, and why
such variable results? Are some languages better than others? Do some things
translate better than others? Can Google Translate be trusted?

The pages that follow dive into the question of how well Google Translate
accomplishes the job it says it does. This started out as a technical research
study, with measurements designed with academic rigor to compare translations
from English to the other 102 Google languages. Along the way, though, it
became evident that there was a much bigger story than whether Google found
the right words in one language or another. The story involved human
psychology, media gullibility, and corporate mendacity – a rich mixture of
hope and hubris, built on a platform of data and deceit.
 


Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics



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