High-end machine translation...

Ran across a site put up by NeuroTran®. These folks are really proud of their product.

It's so fast, they say, it'll translate a 250-page book in an hour.

Of course it does so accurately, being a high-end product that relies on "advanced artificial intelligence rules" that allow the program to "understand" what it's dealing with.

Example:

Sentence-to-sentence, German->English

Source text:
Es ist lange her, dass Anleger begeistert Yahoo schreien konnten. Doch die jetzt vorgelegten Zahlen des US-internetkonzerns gaben erstmals nach einer langen Dürrenperiode wieder Anlass zu einem Freudenschrei: Yahoo hat im zweiten Quartal auf Pro-Forma-Basis einen geringen Gewinn erwirtschaftet und übertraf damit die Schätzungen der Analysten.

Translation:
It was a long time ago, that investors enthusiastic Yahoo was able to scream. But now propounded numbers of the US-Internet company gave for the first time after a long dried-up preiod again occasion for a joy scream. Yahoo obtained in the second quarter on a pro-Forma - basis small profit and surpassed with that the estimates of the Analyst.

The "preiod" is a sic; I touch-typed the German and may have introduced errors.

The translation itself is a scream. It certainly is nowhere near ready for public consumption, and there are too many "ifs" in the translation to allow one to guess at the meaning. (The last sentence, though, is at least understandable... kind of.)

Take the first sentence. If you asked me to rewrite it in English, based on the program's output, my first try would be:

It's been a long time since Yahoo! investors have been able to shout with joy.

Here are some more tries:

A long time ago, Yahoo! investors could scream enthusiastically.

A long time ago, enthusiastic Yahoo! investors could yell.

I'm sure there are some alternatives that I'm missing, but then again, I'm not really applying myself. Can anyone else come up with interesting variations?

Ye gods.

Cheers...

An 'afterburner' kind of day...

A total of 9 radiograms crossed my desk today, and to make things even more interesting, the network drive these things were stored on picked today to start to behave strangely. So strangely, in fact, that my computer up and died on me, requiring a reboot using the Big Red Switch.

Fortunately, I lost no work, just a lot of time. Once the machine had rebooted, I was only able to log in successfully on my second attempt; during my first, I could not connect to any drive on the network, which made the login script very sad.

While waiting for the net to "revive," I spent some time in the X Windows system on the eSlate. Somehow, something got terribly corrupted in just my account, resulting in a very strange looking panel and a persistent failure of OpenOffice to stay open (it'd open, then close suddenly with no error message).

The drive was down long enough for me to fix the problem (I think). For a while, I thought it had to do with my monkeying around with the system to see about enabling Cyrillic fonts, but that turned out not to be the case. (Cyrillic doesn't work still, dontcha know.)

* * *Shall I go see AotC? I don't know, really. I'm really not feeling up to it right now, and I'm a little short of cash (which reminds me... I need to stop by the bank on the way home to make a couple of deposits.

Then once home, I need to renew my efforts to convince Lee to go back up to Pagosa with me. She can set up her Linux/MUD box at the house and I can teach her to program the thing (which is something I don't think will happen if she stays in Texas). She can put some money aside by helping out at the store, or at least not spending money on all of the temptations available in Houston (movies, restaurants, etc.). I fear, if she stays here, that she'll get nothing accomplished and further into debt. But I cannot force her to see the light (as I see it).

* * *Multitran is still down, which is a real shame, since the Lingvo site (run by ABBYY) is far and away in second place, with an interface that doesn't understand morphology very well and groks only the simplest of phrases. Indeed, clicking on 'translate' on the Lingvo page results in nothing of the sort.

If you enter a phrase, the result of your query is a list of the individual words in the phrase (if you're lucky), each of which will take you to the dictionary entry for that word. Whee! (For the most part, I have all of that on the VAIO.)

* * *Drew's been bugging me the past few days about enrolling in the online Phoenix University. If the pages he faxed a couple of nights ago are any indication, his first class should have started today (I read them; didn't see any place that required my signature). I really hope he got everything together in time to start.

Time to get ready to go. It's been a long day.

Cheers...