Re: CHAT: Machine translation (was Re: translation)

Hi Mark,

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
[snip]
> > > One of the more amusing boo-boos is where he goes to foreign
> > > cities "to give lectures, _to char them_..." EH??? At first I
> thought it was a
> > > misprint for "to chair them", but of course it's "dar conferencias,
> > > _charlas_..." (lit. CHATS) i.e. TALKS, dammit. Worthy of one
> of our relays!!!!
>
> That's its generic algorithm for dealing with unrecognized words.  It
> leaves them untranslated, but attempts to infer the appropriate part
> of speech and inflection from typical morphology.  So it sees
> "charlas", infers some verb "char" with direct object "las", and then
> renders it in English as "*to* char" because Spanish *char is clearly
> the infinitive form...
>
> Back when I was taking Spanish, I used to conjugate random words that
> happened to end in -ar - Spanish or otherwise(*), so I have some
> sympathy for the approach, but it's still a silly result.
>
> (*) One such posited verb is *tashayar, coined circa 1987-1988, which
> means "to act unconvincingly butch".  tashayo, tashayas, tashaya,
> tashayamos, tashayais, tashayan.
*tashayar, "to act unconvincingly butch"
 - no doubt derived by analogy from -
sashayar, "to act (convincingly or otherwise) gay, to sashay" ?

I think your method will take you far ... (fayo, fayas, faya ...).
Hardihahahar!  (Evidentemente, hardihahahayo.)

Regards,
Yahya

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