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A comment on The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Translation (2017). Parent comment

Re:The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Transla... by cjohansson on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @07:39AM (#17652340)
I remember when Google announced their recent updated translation engine and Swedish and Finnish translations got significantly worse despite the marketing messages. I don't see progress, rather regress, in the computer translation area at all but services with human translators are becoming more usable thanks to the Internet and I think that area will see progress in the future.
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Re:The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Transla... by Avamander on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @08:02AM (#17652452)
Speaking of Finnish. Finnish and Estonian both I think have the problem that can't even be solved, they don't have gendered pronouns but proper English sentences require that information, which means that translations to English are weird-sounding to say the least.
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Re:The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Transla... by cjohansson on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @08:12AM (#17652512)
Yes Finnish seems to be especially hard to translate, Google and Bing often produce English that is close to gibberish
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Re:The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Transla... by InitialLastName on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @02:32PM (#17655763)
I wonder if this is getting easier as certain genres of English writing transition to using non-gendered pronouns.
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Re:The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Transla... by nradov on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @12:05PM (#17654373)
The problem can sometimes be solved by inferring pronoun gender from the surrounding context.
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