Copier Auto-Translates Japanese to English 244
StCredZero writes "Wild. Fuji has created a photocopier that automatically translates documents from Japanese to English. That's pretty nuts. Apparently, the copier can figure out what sections are text, OCR the text, send it to a translation engine, and put the english back into place."
All the cartoon drawings... (Score:2, Funny)
Tattoos.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:All the cartoon drawings... (Score:4, Funny)
Dear Sir,
Your opponent is me! With regard to your memo dated 14th inst., I'll never forgive you, vampire bastard! Super ultra science business meeting, engage!
Noooooooooooooooo!
Yours faithfully,
Bob Morton
Chief Gundam Officer
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This copier thing sucks, though. It eliminates my ability to use an analogy that's near and dear to my heart. When I build a server, I use a base image. I've had many, many people tell me stupid things like "Oh, I don't use images. Sometimes when you use images, things get all out of sync and they're not consistent." Uh, yeah they are, idiot. That's the whole point of using an image. When I build a new server, the only thing that differs betwe
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(I tried so hard not to rise to the bait... I honestly did. Then I thought of the power/powder pun and I couldn't stop. Damn you Psykechan! Damn you!
Not new (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not new (Score:5, Funny)
You're not joking [worsethanfailure.com]. It is completely worth your time to read this entire image.
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ether lord - lost in translation (Score:4, Funny)
Since I could never have created the above err, prose, myself, I typed the following answer into babelfish and translated it into Japanese, and for good measure, back into English.
Clearly that remains for those of us who have achieved the title Ether Lord to know, and for the rest never to find out!
Re:Not new (Score:4, Funny)
You glue the sex rubber mat.
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Absorb interpret tentacles the multiple of available for perhaps, orifice many maybe? ^_^
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Actually, ew. It's an ethernet switch. I really don't want to know what that bit's for!
Greatest invention of all time (Score:2)
Well, I mean the packing list includes a "for glue the sex rubber mat" -- so it can't possibly be that bad, could it? Actually, ew. It's an ethernet switch. I really don't want to know what that bit's for!
It sounds like they've come up with the greatest invention of all time - an ethernet switch that allows you to completely circumvent the computer and have your pr0n delivered directly to the ultimate....ah...consumer. God bless those crazy bastards.
Not only into English (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously the translator was all at sea.
Re:Not new (Score:5, Funny)
Manga and Anime (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine if you upload anime to YouTube, and it automatically includes an English subtitle.
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This OCR based stuff would still be handy for automatically translating manga I suppose though.
I know that there are a few things out there in Japanese that haven't been released in English yet I wouldn't mind.
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Re:Manga and Anime (Score:5, Informative)
Without the kanji, since a large number of Japanese words are homophones, I can't see this being practical in the near future. Text is different - with the kanji, it's not terribly difficult to look up the correct word and with kana grammar beside it, the task gets much easier. I can't see a machine understand a conversation in context, however.
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Oh, yeah, let me imagine that... given this concrete example. :)
"Sharingan no hontou no chikara ga...kono Uchiha Madara no chikara ga."
Assuming you have a RAW of suitable quality for the machine to accurately read the furigana, the babelfish-esque translation for this would be:
"True power of copying wheel eye... among these the power of variegation."
Yeah... Anyway, there are literally pages of discussion on Wikipedia regarding this line because some human beings accidentally mistranslated this f
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That's just because there's no limit to the number of pages a web-encyclopedia can have. If you *removed* the M:TG pages, this wouldn't somehow magically make those pages on east-european weightlifters appear.
I agree it's a bad thing that some notable topics that aren't popular with techie types are under-covered. But I don't see a problem at all with "over-coverage" of trivialities that *are* popular with techie types. Who cares ? What is the *disadvantage* of having a page on every M:TG card ?
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Truly, on that day my life would be complete!
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I guess it's just a matter of time before Viz and other manga translators try to have this thing declared illegal. We can't have people importing their own manga from Japan, now can we ? After all, then Viz couldn't take years to translate it.
I wonder how they're going to go about it. Maybe language barrier could be considered effective copy protection ? It's not that different from crypting schemes like the C
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Hey as long as we're imagining shit that doesn't exist and doesn't look like it's going to happen any time in the near future...
I just photocopied this article (Score:5, Funny)
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Now getting the co
Re:I just photocopied this article (Score:4, Insightful)
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Going from 20% accuracy to 40% accuracy is a "significant improvement" -- it's a 100% improvement. And a 25% reduction of crap, if you want to look at it the other way.
That still doesn't mean it's going to be usable.
As long as you're on the bad side of 99% accuracy, it's nowhere near "good enough". 99% accuracy still means there's going to be a couple on errors on every single page. Some of the errors mig
Says someone who's never translated something. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, 'cause researchers have long promised us that AI will reach us in 10 years. <sarcasm>
Seriously, I think you underestimate the difficulty of translating. Have you done any major foreign-language translation -- especially of conversational speech? My experience has primarily been with Japanese and English, and I'll tell you right now that it can be nightmarish.
Sentence fragments are the worst part. Japanese has a completely different word order from English. All modifiers (including phrases and clauses) come before the word they modify, and the language has a Subject-Object-Verb order. "I just saw the man who stole my friend's watch last Tuesday" becomes "Just I Last Tuesday friend's watch stole man saw." Now try translating that from Japanese to English when the sentence is cut in half.
Worse, the language has very different levels of allowed vagueness. "Complete" sentences in Japanese can contain just a descriptor or an action without any specification of who did/was what. Conversely, translating "3 of them" in English to Japanese is hard because you have to know "3 of what?" to know what counting suffix to use.
Another problem is that many very different words sound exactly the same when conjugated to the gerund or perfective forms. English has a number of homonyms, but there are MANY more opportunities for mix-ups if you don't have access to kanji to tell the semantic meaning apart because Japanese has a much more limited range of phonemes. For example, take "katte" which is the gerund form of the verbs "kau" (buy), "kau" (keep/raise), "karu" (cut), "karu" (spur on), and "katsu" (win). That's 5 completely different verbs that conjugate to the same sound. If they're written phonetically or your going from speech, then you have to be able to understand the meaning behind the words to translate. (Did I mention earlier that you may not have an explicit subject and object to go off of?)
Then you get into issues of translating things like politeness levels, different ways of addressing people, and other concepts that don't translate well into English or concepts like singular vs. plural that are dropped in going to Japanese. Let's not even consider puns and poetry!
These are not trivial issues. An automatic translator would need to somehow be able to conceptualize what a person is trying to speak about, which would require understanding the story being told and an ability to predict where they are going with it. This will require strong AI.
Accurate and intelligible translation is an art -- not a science -- because it requires an intuitive and empathetic ability to understand the mind of the speaker well enough to map their thoughts into a different method of expression.
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You may well have an amazing statistical technique that can compare your web page sentence-by-sentence to a massive corpus of bilingual pages, but how is it going to know whether "kondo ha simasu" on your page means "this time I'll do it", "this time you'll do it", "next time they'll do
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What the grandparent post is saying is that you might not have a full sentence, nor might a full sentence even provide sufficient information to perform the translation accurately. If Japanese and English were so easy to translate back and forth, don't you think that humans [engrish.com] would have an easier time of it?
The method of analyzing bilingual pages is great for languages that have a similar structure to one another, like italian and spanish. In fact, this is part of how I learned spanish, by reading a bilingua
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I think you are missing the point a bit. A native Japanese speaker will not have any problem understanding the japanese sentence even with the insufficient context(from the perspective of say an Englishman) but he will have problem with a sentence of similar sort which is in English even if he understands english quite well. The l
Some promises you just have to give up on. (Score:3)
I am not exaggerating when I say that automatic translation from extremely dissimilar languages requires strong AI. You need to be able to guess what a person is thinking from what they're expressing to map it into a different way of expressi
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I totally agree with your excellent post. I know Russian very well and in the past I have used what is considered to be the best EnglishRussian translation program. It was certainly better than nothing, but it had many flaws. Many European languages, including Russian, use double negatives. For example, it is quite to correct to say in Russian
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shouldn't that be (Score:5, Funny)
No. (Score:2)
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No, no, no! "You fair it!"
duh...
Re:shouldn't that be (Score:5, Funny)
But, the catch is... (Score:2, Insightful)
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By FAR the slow part is the physical scanning and printing.
All your base are belong to us. (Score:2)
Engrish (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Engrish (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Engrish (Score:5, Funny)
As for this it's possible it keeps being surprised (Score:2, Funny)
I think of that this is rather sweet. As for converting Japanese rather than easy, converting other manner with a certain manner, with other manner hard. As for existence of Chinese character, for example, thing is made easier. But (with easily from Chinese character. Chinese which becomes complete)
-:sigma.SB
Re:As for this it's possible it keeps being surpri (Score:2)
Re:As for this it's possible it keeps being surpri (Score:2)
-FL
Reminds me of "NewsRadio"... (Score:5, Funny)
Jimmy: I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business comes to my hut. Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute, for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo...
[pauses while turning page]
Jimmy: dung.
and pron it is used for! (Score:2)
Finally! Now I can pour my collection of Hentai into one and enjoy the interesting story lines and character development...
But I wonder does the english language contain enough exclamations though: Uh!, Ah! ?
It's impossible... (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I'm a translation student myself
Re:It's impossible... (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I'm a second language acquisition researcher and assessor.
I concur. Absolutely. Language is not pure information; it's information shorthand. It assumes a high degree of already-shared knowledge about the world. Some of these assumptions are near-universal; many are not.
Japanese and English (my languages) offer a great example, especially as it pertains to machine translation. Whereas English is a subject-predicate language, where basically all the information is encoded in the language stream, Japanese is a topic-comment language, where, once set, the "subject" is not re-stated until it changes. Beginning Anglophone learners of Japanese make the mistake of putting a "wa" to denote what they think of as the subject in every sentence, when it does not need to be there. "Wa" is a topic marker; not a subject marker.
This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about language and, therefore, about the world. Germanic languages seek to operate regardless of context; Asian languages seek to augment (or "comment on") it. If you've ever felt that Japanese people who speak English are beating around the bush or being vague, part of that is cultural, but part of that is the language of the culture that does not require explicitness. A big part of learning Japanese or, for Japanese people, of learning English is learning how to think about the world and about human interactions in a very different way.
Machines aren't human. They are information processors. They don't know what a "cat" is; they just know that it's a piece of code that can be slotted into a certain place in a set of syntax. Until machines are really intelligent (and I don't think that will be anytime soon), expect more crappy translation than useful. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something (a crappy machine translator, to be exact!).
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I think you mean "Sensation is to be had for Japan people between English languages, fights of the hibiscus round will be".
HTH, HAND,
--
*Art
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Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something (a crappy machine translator, to be exact!).
Well put, and you may get free shipping if you add a "USB Humping Dog" to your cart:
Or get your hump on with a USB Humping Dog -- on sale now, satisfaction guaranteed! http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/index.php/shop/product/usb_humping_dog/ [digitalworldtokyo.com]
"Satisfaction guaranteed"? For the buyer or the dog?
(so glad I RTFA)
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My girlfriends in Germany so one of my friends was messing around translating silly things to German. For one of them, he put:
Selina's tang is mighty fine
Which translated to:
Der tang von Selina ist mächtige Geldstrafe
When I translated this back to English (he didn't tell me the original phrase till later:
The seaweed of Selina is powerful fine
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Now the tang meaning you had was obviously something else, but from one sentence it's impossible for a machine or in fact a human to figure out which it is. (Since I haven't seen the word "t
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Tang is a seaweed in both Deutsch and English, it did get translated both ways. My point was that since there is no way of deducting that he meant one of the other meanings of tang in English from just one line the translation was technically correct both ways.
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And tang as in seaweed makes perfect sense in that sentence, as does other meanings of the word tang, so as I already said twice, it was a correct translation.
from engligh to japanese and back by google trans (Score:2, Redundant)
Secret feature (Score:2)
Always hit the 'Clear All' button. (Score:2)
It's just going to be a matter of time... (Score:3, Funny)
I can't wait to see the problems this causes... (Score:2)
Is this thing standalone? (Score:2)
Is it standalone, or does it phone home? If it sends the content out for translation, it's a huge security hole for an organization.
Konnichi day! (Score:2)
Doshte nobody invented befole, I don't know! Cullently I'm using baka velsion online; it wolks pelfectly!
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Gero-gero hafu-gaijin!
Compare this to Babel Fish (Score:2)
Common exercise: take the article, drop its text into Babelfish [altavista.com], translate it from English to and back again. When doing so from English to Japanese and back, the results are:
One time (Score:2)
The owner's had cameras installed to deter the selling of crack in front of the building. The problem is, nobody cared. The cameras are small and not easily seen. They went about slingin' rock as usual.
I decided to print up a sign with a big camera on it. I typed out something like "This building is watched by Surveillance Cameras. Any illegal ac
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Este edificio se encuentra vigilado por Cámaras de Monitoreo. Toda actividad ilegal será grabada y entregada a la policía.
There are of course many other ways to put it, but if they laugh this time will be because they don't give a hoot about the cameras or the police. I hope your problem gets solved!
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Better is the portuguese translation: This building is taked attention by Surveillance Cameras. All illegal activity (that is allright for brasilian portuguese) will be recorded and the police will be examined.
Italian and ge
Hmm, I wonder what it costs (Score:2)
not quite what it appears (Score:2)
In other words, it's not a translation box at all. It's a networked scanner/copier that passes the scan to a server parked somewhere else to modify the page and send it back to the printer.
To call it a translator without mentioning the big box sitting across the office that goes with it, is a bit fra
no more amazing (Score:2)
left out of headline: "...but not very well" (Score:2)
Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm know I've used online translation services when I absolutely needed to know what something said and there was no native speaker around. In fact, since native speakers are generally unsure of exact translations (despite speaking both languages fluently) I find the poor translations online better than 'well, it means this, but t
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Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
"Today is under construction... please do not be alarmed by the construction men hanging themselves from outside your balcony. We will take them down tomorrow..."
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Actually, this may not be automatic. Japanese and English are (I understand) two languages which differ on fundamental levels. It's not like trying to get to the station and using Franglais: "poor alley a la gar?" It's totally different. Translation is very, very hard, and words are used differently, too. My last job involved working from a spec written in Japanese, and translated by obviously intelligent Japanese people into English. It was... interes
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But the will which ", therefore i why, or is possible and/or therefore whether the time comes designate the person, as the canned goods
Are those sought? "
--Shakespeare, Henry four world, pt. One behavior III
It's the voluntary collaboration with a data tap.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, put that baby in the CEO's office..
(not the mention the fact that there's a huge gap between mechanical translations and the subtleties of language only a skilled translator and/or native speaker has any hope of translating).
So, IMHO cute idea, but don't expect me to bu one any time soon.