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24 October 2006

Online Translation, how far you have come.... I found an old email in my sent items; it's about 5 years old. I had used some site to translate, from Spanish to English, a short bio of Willy Deville.[More:]I sent it along to a friend of mine when I stopped laughing. He was a Willy fan too. In fact, he turned me onto Miracle, which I still love.

Anyway, here's the bio. It's a work of art in and of itself. I thought of highlighting the best parts, but truly, it's all pretty good.

Diverse theories, but most trustworthy they assure that exist on the matter William Ramsay, distant heir of Irish genes by a side and Basoues by the other, was born the 25 of August 1950 in Stanford, a locality near New York. From very young, one feels attracted by black music, from the romanticism of the vocal groups of the sixty to the dryness of the old ones bluesmen: " I liked music since she was very, very young. The radio always was ignited during the breakfast. The first time that really I can remember to say "Guau, What is that? I like. It was a song of the Crystals, Gives doo Run Run or Then There am Kissed Me, one of those with a so hollow sound. It had as about five years and I began to sing with the radio" And it is that (we suppose) the innocent Willy soon is become a small gangster of district thanks to its older brother, who taught to him to get dressed, to comb and other essential knowledge in any aspiring to uncle cool.

The legend, widely spread by the own one interested, counts among other things that escaped of house being minor, that spent nights to the flat one in the island of Manhattan and that thanked to personality to its nose to him to the altruistic collaboration of the fists of which they did not finish seeing the grace him his close arrogance.

After diverse excursions that took to him to that another stay in the jail by narcotic possession, Willy travels to London at the beginning of the seventy. But what it saw did not have to like too much, because it changes quickly of idea and one becomes to the USA. Once there, it discovers that New York is dead, that is something as well as "the night of living deads" in speeedica key, and is transferred San Francisco. During a pair of Willy years it crosses the country in search of musicians able to fit his single ones to less than twenty minutes. While, and forms Billy DeSade the Marquis, where already they were some of the musicians who would form Mink DeVille years later.


I only wish I had the source...but I can't help but think that translation might be more, oh, I dunno, fluid, if I tried with one of the current sites!
I dunno, machine translation hasn't really improved much in ... decades, that I know. SYSTRAN is the basis of both babelfish and Google Translation, and it was developed in 1968.
posted by stilicho 24 October | 11:42
serious question - what makes you think machine translation has improved since then?

As far as I can make out, that text looks pretty good as far as these things go - largely intelligible if you screw your eyes up and don't concentrate too hard.

Machine translation has its uses - within large organisations with clearly-defined terminology banks and largely unvarying documentation, for one - but it is still not capable of replacing a human translator in most domains.
posted by altolinguistic 24 October | 11:49
Well, as I said, I don't have the original source to compare, but my more recent experiences using machine translation have been more successful and less humourous, at least to me.

Don't get me wrong, the clunkiness of this translation was pure joy for me to read. I have had better experiences more recently is all. The point (which I appear to have made poorly) was how funny some of the text was. Not so much how poor the translation was. I guess I wasn't too clear. Ah well.
posted by richat 24 October | 11:58
The only thing that sucks about being me is... || So, you're watching a play.

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