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A long way to go
Aug. 13th, 2012 09:39 amLately I have been messing around with Esperanto, which like several other hobbies I picked up as a young man and had to drop when I got married and started raising a family. If you've heard of it, it's probably in the context of "it's a language that everyone in the world was supposed to learn to speak, but nobody speaks it any more" or some such incorrect piece of information. It is in fact alive and well, and like many constructed languages (from Solresol to Klingon) the Internet has given it a pretty sizeable boost. It's the 16th or 17th largest language on Wikipedia in terms of the number of articles written in the language, and it's one of 64 or so languages available on Google Translate.
Google Translate is an example of how "it's not so much that the bear dances well, as that it dances at all." Some of the translations I've run through it are pretty good. Many are lacking in one or more ways, primarily in the absence of certain words in Google Translate's vocabulary. For instance, it doesn't know the word "banjo." (For the record, the Esperanto word for banjo is . . . "banĝo." The two are pronounced the same; the letter "ĝ" in Esperanto has the same sound as the g in "ledge" or "orange.")
And this morning, it got one translation very, very wrong. There's a site called "Lernu!" (Esperanto for "Learn!") that sends out a word of the day every day, defined and with examples in Esperanto. Today's word was "veneno," which means "poison." The examples are sentences like "Plena glaso da vino, sed kun guto da veneno." (A full glass of wine, but with a drop of poison.) They show how the word can be used as a noun, a verb, as part of a proverb ("Running like a poisoned mouse" - something I've never heard before) and even as a part of a statement potentially inconsistent with continued viability ("Nobody can poison me - I'm immune!")
I decided to run the examples through Google Translate to see what would happen. Most of them translated closely enough that I could make the leap the rest of the way, and a few contained words that Google didn't understand, like "veneniĝo", literally "becoming poisoned".
And then we got to the last example, "Li povas morti, ĉar ni ne havas kontraŭvenenon." Google translated this as "He can not die, because we do not have an antidote." Kudos to Google for having "kontraŭveneno", literally "counter-venom", in its vocabulary. But the first part of the sentence is not just incorrect, it's wrong. "Li povas morti" means "He could die" or "It is possible that he can die." Google's translation "He can not die" is the polar opposite of what it should be.
I doubt anyone would ever use Google Translate to save someone's life, and if they did I doubt they'd need to do so by translating Esperanto into English. Even so, one has to wonder how Google got "povi" into its vocabulary with a value of "can not" instead of "could."
And for the record, it's not just English. "Li povas morti" comes out as "Él no puede morir" in Spanish and "Er kann nicht sterben" in German, both meaning "He can't die" and both just as wrong as in English.
Machine translation these days is moderately good. It's at least in a lot better shape than it was when I first heard about it in the early 1970s. But it still has a long way to go.
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I haven't been doing a lot of radio lately, but Saturday I fired up the software to see who was out and about. Conditions were good, and I saw signals from France, Germany and England. Other stations were calling hams in Eastern Europe and Africa, but I couldn't hear them.
When the French station ended up a QSO with a station near me and started calling CQ, I decided to answer him. To my delight and surprise he came back with a signal report just on the lower edge of the "good" range. I had hoped to catch the German station too but apparently he went off the air while I was making my exchange with the French station.
There's a natural phenomenon called the sunspot cycle. You may have heard of it. Over about an 11 year period the number sunspots waxes and wanes, and when it gets high, it's good news for high frequency radio communications. At the peak of the sunspot cycle in 1979 I was working stations all over the world on 10 meters. The peak of the sunspot cycle is going to arrive within the next year or so and I want to be ready. Maybe the opening to Europe over the weekend is an indication that it's on its way.
Google Translate is an example of how "it's not so much that the bear dances well, as that it dances at all." Some of the translations I've run through it are pretty good. Many are lacking in one or more ways, primarily in the absence of certain words in Google Translate's vocabulary. For instance, it doesn't know the word "banjo." (For the record, the Esperanto word for banjo is . . . "banĝo." The two are pronounced the same; the letter "ĝ" in Esperanto has the same sound as the g in "ledge" or "orange.")
And this morning, it got one translation very, very wrong. There's a site called "Lernu!" (Esperanto for "Learn!") that sends out a word of the day every day, defined and with examples in Esperanto. Today's word was "veneno," which means "poison." The examples are sentences like "Plena glaso da vino, sed kun guto da veneno." (A full glass of wine, but with a drop of poison.) They show how the word can be used as a noun, a verb, as part of a proverb ("Running like a poisoned mouse" - something I've never heard before) and even as a part of a statement potentially inconsistent with continued viability ("Nobody can poison me - I'm immune!")
I decided to run the examples through Google Translate to see what would happen. Most of them translated closely enough that I could make the leap the rest of the way, and a few contained words that Google didn't understand, like "veneniĝo", literally "becoming poisoned".
And then we got to the last example, "Li povas morti, ĉar ni ne havas kontraŭvenenon." Google translated this as "He can not die, because we do not have an antidote." Kudos to Google for having "kontraŭveneno", literally "counter-venom", in its vocabulary. But the first part of the sentence is not just incorrect, it's wrong. "Li povas morti" means "He could die" or "It is possible that he can die." Google's translation "He can not die" is the polar opposite of what it should be.
I doubt anyone would ever use Google Translate to save someone's life, and if they did I doubt they'd need to do so by translating Esperanto into English. Even so, one has to wonder how Google got "povi" into its vocabulary with a value of "can not" instead of "could."
And for the record, it's not just English. "Li povas morti" comes out as "Él no puede morir" in Spanish and "Er kann nicht sterben" in German, both meaning "He can't die" and both just as wrong as in English.
Machine translation these days is moderately good. It's at least in a lot better shape than it was when I first heard about it in the early 1970s. But it still has a long way to go.
---------------------------------------------
I haven't been doing a lot of radio lately, but Saturday I fired up the software to see who was out and about. Conditions were good, and I saw signals from France, Germany and England. Other stations were calling hams in Eastern Europe and Africa, but I couldn't hear them.
When the French station ended up a QSO with a station near me and started calling CQ, I decided to answer him. To my delight and surprise he came back with a signal report just on the lower edge of the "good" range. I had hoped to catch the German station too but apparently he went off the air while I was making my exchange with the French station.
There's a natural phenomenon called the sunspot cycle. You may have heard of it. Over about an 11 year period the number sunspots waxes and wanes, and when it gets high, it's good news for high frequency radio communications. At the peak of the sunspot cycle in 1979 I was working stations all over the world on 10 meters. The peak of the sunspot cycle is going to arrive within the next year or so and I want to be ready. Maybe the opening to Europe over the weekend is an indication that it's on its way.
