Comments on: Machine translation and translating a literary text https://thesupercargo.com/machine-translation-and-translating-a-literary-text/ Words, Images, Speech Wed, 17 Aug 2022 13:12:50 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.1 By: John https://thesupercargo.com/machine-translation-and-translating-a-literary-text/#comment-12598 Wed, 17 Aug 2022 13:12:50 +0000 https://thesupercargo.com/?p=13991#comment-12598 In reply to Deborah Hubbard.

Idiom is an eternal problem for machine translation. If an idiom is so well established the machine knows it, it’s probably on its way out in human daily use. Everything else, yes, the machines interpret literally. I don’t think machine translation is ever going to seriously challenge human translators, but there are plenty of people with no ear for language and no money to spend on translators who will happily couple their websites to Google and live with the results. At least that gives the rest of us something to laugh at.
🙂

]]> By: Deborah Hubbard https://thesupercargo.com/machine-translation-and-translating-a-literary-text/#comment-12413 Sat, 16 Jul 2022 17:03:58 +0000 https://thesupercargo.com/?p=13991#comment-12413 Great topic, John! I do write and translate back and forth between English and German and a friend recommended DeepL to me. I tested it out and it was not bad – as long as you are fairly competent in both languages, at least. Which I happen to be. So I took up DeepL’s offer of a month’s free trial and tossed my backlog of stories through it – short ones and even a novel. I must say, the speed with which they tossed the stories back at me was dizzying! If it’s a story I wrote in German, it’s a cinch to bring it up to speed in English, but having the DeepL version expedites the process for me. A story of mine written in English and tossed into German takes me a little longer. They (meaning DeepL) translate idiomatic expressions literally and sometimes I’m not quite sure if it’s legitimate to say it like that in German. And it’s often not. That’s what German native speakers are good for. My son is one in fact. Great to have a home-grown expert at my disposal.

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