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I assume the true test of translation software would be to translate a phrase through three or four languages and back to the original and still preserve the original meaning.
Facebook’s language translation is now finally powered by several large neural networks. The social media giant announced on Thursday it has switched to using neural networks for translating people's posts and status updates. It’s not the first outfit to make this kind of jump – Google and Microsoft upgraded their translation …
I would expect that a good human translator could translate David's original post from English to Turkish and preserve the meaning. Then another translator from Turkish to Russian. Then another from Russian to Japanese. Then another from Japanese to English. It may not be the exact same sentence, but the meaning would be the same. I agree with him, a true test of translation software would be that it is capable of doing the same.
Though translation software that good would take away the fun of using translation software to take a sentence and translate it from language A to language B and back again repeatedly until it settles on a particular sentence in language A. The results are quite often hilarious, and shows how far translation software still has to go.
I have some Facebook friends who are from other countries, so they might make posts and have friends comment in Dutch, Finnish and so forth. I've used the 'translate' link on them and seen some pretty hilarious stuff. I'll have to see it is still as funny now that Facebook has supposedly improved its translation software.
All I can say is that watching the output of (allegedly) human translators working on TV show subtitles, they startlingly often demonstrate a lack of context sensitivity (even to context from within the same show) that can and does produce incredibly absurd results with words that can have several meanings, the right one being obvious to even a layman paying some attention to the text he's working on, past the current sentence...
Wanna have fun? Watch 'Das Boot', the original version, in German, with the original English subtitles. If you know even a little German or if you're watching with a German-speaker, hilarity ensues. It's not supposed to be a comedy...
Fans of Sven Hassel's stories about a Danish volunteer in a German tank company in WWII can have similar fun by having the German and English versions of a book side-by-side. For the most fun, try 'Blitzfreeze' and 'SS General'.
"Watch 'Das Boot', the original version, in German, with the original English subtitles."
Oh, you're totally on! I actually have that I just haven't watched it yet, and I always watch with subtitles and the original audio. I know enough German for demo purposes, so it sounds like I'm in for some fun...