[ RadSafe ] 3-year old boy goes through luggage X-ray checkpointin Denmark

[neildm at id.doe.gov]

 With the current state-of-the-art of artificial intelligence, translations of this sort are doomed from the start. Literal transcription plus grammar rules won't do it.

The statement that "Milton Berle was called 'The Thief of Bad Gag'" probably made most of the Americans (over 50 or so) smile, and most of the non-Americans say "Huh?"  In one short sentence there are two "tribal knowledge" references, a pun, and a colloquial meaning close to the inverse of the literal meaning.  I can only imagine what a literal-minded translation program could do to it.

If anyone wants to discuss it , we should take it off-line.

Dave Neil

-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl] On Behalf Of ROY HERREN
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 10:36 AM
To: Ahmad Al-Ani; Bjorn Cedervall; Dutch Radsafers
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] 3-year old boy goes through luggage X-ray checkpointin Denmark

This is more of a comment on Google's English translation.  It's horrible!  I would like to point to a single instance of where the translation has gone wrong, but with so many problems it would be difficult to know where to start.  Clearly computer aided translations are still a work in progress!
 Roy Herren