Translation.P-Translator.info

Star Trek has a wonderful device called the universal translator. It translates spoken and written alien languages into English, and would probably translate different human languages, if there were more than one in that specifically created future. Though it doesn’t know how to translate isolated foreign words like Russian or French, it is a truly marvelous technology. Almost never fails. Never loses power, even when the rest of the ship does, same as the artificial gravity. No moving parts, in fact, no parts at all. It is just ‘around’, always there, always doing its job without anyone having to think about it. A little like the Internet is becoming now, just a banal fact of life.

Sadly, it is based on the false premise that words in other languages have a one for one relationship with words in English. That Turkish doesn’t have two words for ‘know’, and Russian doesn’t have two words for ‘Blue’. It dictates that languages don’t have both an inclusive and an exclusive ‘we’. (We (inclus) = ‘Me, you, and maybe other people’. we (exclus) = ‘Me, and other person or people excluding you’.) There is a false belief that all languages have only singular and plural constructs, and not up to five categories. Some languages have dual as well as singular and plural, and different categories so ‘every computer’ clearly means either ‘every computer in sight’ or it means ‘every computer that exists, has existed, and ever will exist’, but the two forms of ‘every computer’ can’t be confused with each other.

We’ve started building our own ‘universal translators’ which naturally are on the Internet. I can have paragraphs translated into French or German, or from French to German. Or, I can get whole websites in other languages translated for me. I’ve never had a website translated, but I sometimes get phrases translated when I want a fictional character to say something in another language. I sometimes, just for fun, translate something through two other languages and then back into English to see how good online translations are getting. It is also to reassure myself that computers won’t completely replace humans in the next week or two.

This is my standard signature block after a computer has translated it into French (using http://translation2.paralink.com/):

Original English version: Allan T. Price is a creative writer working at M6.Net: ‘The web-hosting company for humans.’ M6.Net is working hard to help humanity experience the power and freedom to develop their own part of the Internet, to share their information and connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Allan T. Le prix est un auteur cr

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