[Corpora-List] Google's translations

[Eric Rochester]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 7:41 AM, John F. Sowa <sowa at bestweb.net> wrote:

> > Clearly the massive amount of English training data has certain
> > extremely unfortunate consequences for the choice of lexical items.
> > It is amusing, but could be potentially very confusing, when one
> > currency is translated to another (but not recalculated!).,,
>
> >
> > Olje koster kr 800 fatet. Gassen koster NOK 400 mens vindkraft
> > koster seksti kroner.
> >
> > Oil costs U.S. $ 800 per barrel. The gas costs NOK 400, while
> > wind power costs sixty kroner.
>
> That is an example where some rule-based processing should be
> added as a supplement to statistical methods.  It could recognize
> pairs of (unit, value) and either translate both or leave both
> unchanged.
>
> Wolfram's Alpha system (which is used in Microsoft's Bing) can
> handle such examples.  I typed "What is 400 NOK in dollars?"
> to Bing.com and got the answer
>
>   400 NOK = 68.38800 USD
>
>
I'm not sure that this is related to Bing's translation system, though.
While Google's translator mangled this example, Google search handles it
just fine (although they seem to be using a slightly different exchange
rate):

*400 Norwegian kroner = 68.6024 U.S. dollars*


Eric Rochester
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