Typing in japanese *

[Cloud187]

Hey i know you can use babel fish to translate ect, but how accurate is it ? Because when ever i send to japanese person they never reply....

Does anyone here know something more accurate or better, or in fact is there anyone here that could type out about 4-5 sentences in japanese, i just need to send one email for now.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

The last time I used BabelFish, I was in high school and it was still the 20th Century, so I have no clue if my answer is correct or not, but I'll say this: back then, BabelFish was shit, and I imagine it still is. It's a noble goal that the BabelFish team has, don't get me wrong, but they're still years away from being able to find a reliable way of translating English into non-SVO languages like Japanese, especially when languages such as Japanese have words whose meaning vary depending purely on the context in which they are used.

For example, the BabelFish engine would need to look at all of the other words in the sentence or paragraph before assigning a value to a particular Japanese word; but this creates a problem for the computer programmer who would need to write a program which would redundantly retranslate the sentence and know which specific words need to be adjusted and which ones need to be left the same. I'll give you a clear English example:

The ball was kicked off by Jane.

In this sentence, the word "ball" can either mean "a round orb" (like a basketball) or it can mean "a dance or gala assoc. with high society" (like Cinderella who went to the ball). The phrase "kicked off" can mean "knocked off of [something] with a foot or leg" (as in "the drink was kicked off into outer space") or it can mean "begun" (as in "let's get this party started! let's kick it off!").

BabelFish's task would be to discern the meaning of the words based on context. Unfortunately for BabelFish, there are several hindrances which prevent it from recognizing that this sentence means "a party was started by Jane":

1. if it resorts to using the most common meaning of the word, then it would grab both incorrect meanings for the sentence of above, using orb instead of dance and punched but with the feet or legs instead of started or begun.
2. if it tries to define "to kick off" as a separate verb from "to kick" (which would be correct -- they are different verbs as far as meaning is concerned), it encounters the problem of telling apart "to kick off" from "to kick off [preposition]". For example, the prepositional phrase "by Jane" follows "kicked off" in the sentence above, but the prepositional phrase "of the table" or "into outer space" could follow "kicked off" in sentences talking about kicking balls or drinks or bad guys with your feet.

I could list more things, but I think you appreciate the idea I'm trying to convey: BabelFish will one day work beautifully, but until then, the programmers have only two options:
(1) program "brute force"-style and try to account for every single permutation of words in the English language. This is arithmetically suicidal: there are simply too many word combinations.
(2) program "pattern recognition"-style and try to create an engine which can discern grammar in a manner similar to the human mind, which also employs pattern recognition. But this is proving to be much more difficult than the late 20th century computer programmers had anticipated.

P.S. In this specific example, the human brain recognizes (I presume) the following:

• "kicked off" must be followed by the directional prepositions such as "of," "from", "into" to be associated with a change in place, which in turn suggests "kicking" is foot-kicking and not initiation-kicking.
• "kicked off" followed by prepositions like "by" or "for" -- which establish the purpose of the action or the identity of the action-doer -- or conjunctions like "because" or "but" -- which force the previous clause to terminate in its conveyed ideas as the reader moves on to the following clause -- would steer the reader in the direction of assuming that this means "kicked off-initiated" and that "ball" therefore refers to the event, i.e. the social gathering.
• But even with these assumptions, we may still encounter pitfalls! Keep in mind all of the ambiguous words or sentences in English for which there may be no ambiguous counterpart in Japanese! When such words or sentences play key roles in puns or plot twists, everything can be ruined by a translator which picks the incorrect word in the target-language.

 

[jihadist]

The last time I used BabelFish, I was in high school and it was still the 20th Century, so I have no clue if my answer is correct or not, but I'll say this: back then, BabelFish was shit, and I imagine it still is. It's a noble goal that the BabelFish team has, don't get me wrong, but they're still years away from being able to find a reliable way of translating English into non-SVO languages like Japanese, especially when languages such as Japanese have words whose meaning vary depending purely on the context in which they are used.

For example, the BabelFish engine would need to look at all of the other words in the sentence or paragraph before assigning a value to a particular Japanese word; but this creates a problem for the computer programmer who would need to write a program which would redundantly retranslate the sentence and know which specific words need to be adjusted and which ones need to be left the same. I'll give you a clear English example:

The ball was kicked off by Jane.

In this sentence, the word "ball" can either mean "a round orb" (like a basketball) or it can mean "a dance or gala assoc. with high society" (like Cinderella who went to the ball). The phrase "kicked off" can mean "knocked off of [something] with a foot or leg" (as in "the drink was kicked off into outer space") or it can mean "begun" (as in "let's get this party started! let's kick it off!").

BabelFish's task would be to discern the meaning of the words based on context. Unfortunately for BabelFish, there are several hindrances which prevent it from recognizing that this sentence means "a party was started by Jane":

1. if it resorts to using the most common meaning of the word, then it would grab both incorrect meanings for the sentence of above, using orb instead of dance and punched but with the feet or legs instead of started or begun.
2. if it tries to define "to kick off" as a separate verb from "to kick" (which would be correct -- they are different verbs as far as meaning is concerned), it encounters the problem of telling apart "to kick off" from "to kick off [preposition]". For example, the prepositional phrase "by Jane" follows "kicked off" in the sentence above, but the prepositional phrase "of the table" or "into outer space" could follow "kicked off" in sentences talking about kicking balls or drinks or bad guys with your feet.

I could list more things, but I think you appreciate the idea I'm trying to convey: BabelFish will one day work beautifully, but until then, the programmers have only two options:
(1) program "brute force"-style and try to account for every single permutation of words in the English language. This is arithmetically suicidal: there are simply too many word combinations.
(2) program "pattern recognition"-style and try to create an engine which can discern grammar in a manner similar to the human mind, which also employs pattern recognition. But this is proving to be much more difficult than the late 20th century computer programmers had anticipated.

P.S. In this specific example, the human brain recognizes (I presume) the following:

• "kicked off" must be followed by the directional prepositions such as "of," "from", "into" to be associated with a change in place, which in turn suggests "kicking" is foot-kicking and not initiation-kicking.
• "kicked off" followed by prepositions like "by" or "for" -- which establish the purpose of the action or the identity of the action-doer -- or conjunctions like "because" or "but" -- which force the previous clause to terminate in its conveyed ideas as the reader moves on to the following clause -- would steer the reader in the direction of assuming that this means "kicked off-initiated" and that "ball" therefore refers to the event, i.e. the social gathering.
• But even with these assumptions, we may still encounter pitfalls! Keep in mind all of the ambiguous words or sentences in English for which there may be no ambiguous counterpart in Japanese! When such words or sentences play key roles in puns or plot twists, everything can be ruined by a translator which picks the incorrect word in the target-language.

EXCEPT , try translate.google.com, the BEST translator yet.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

The ball was kicked off by Jane.
ボールをジェーンが開幕した。

Without going into too many details, Google was intelligent enough to decipher that "kicked off" in this sentence meant "started the show" (開幕 literally refers to the opening of the curtains, e.g. when a play begins) but for whatever reason it then failed to pair that with the correct ball, instead selecting ボール ("ball", as in one you kick) instead of 舞踏会 or similar words for a dance-ball.

The hot dog jumped into the lake. He barked happily.
ホットドッグを抑えるには、湖に飛び込んだ。彼は幸せに擦りむいた。

Again, Google makes some errors despite contextual clues. An animal is much more likely to jump and to bark than a stick of processed pork ass, yet Google still assumed I was referring to "hot dog" the food item and not "hot dog" the canine who is burning up in the summer heat.
Second, it translated "cool down" to 抑える. While 抑える could be reverse-translated into English as "cool down," it would only apply in the context that "calm down" or "cease being angry" would work. For example, "Honey, calm down!" = "Cool it!" To lose temperature and become cooler ("cool down") is written as 冷める.
Third, in the last sentence they translated "he barked happily" as "in happiness he" ... and then they wrote the verb 擦りむいた. I have NO IDEA what Google is trying to say here, and that could be because I am a non-native speaker, but 擦る is the verb which means "to rub" and as for むいた, the only choices we have for a possibly intended verb are either 向く (to turn towards, to face someone or something) or 剥く (to peel), neither of which makes any sense whatsoever.

Before you say I'm throwing Google curveballs, let's try some random sentences from two eromanga or erodoujinshi.

1. Koto-rin Kanzenban, by Saga Jou / Isaga Sou / whatever the hell the circle calls themselves these days.
マジで言いやがったぜ、コイツ。
IYAGATTA I say I'm serious, KOITSU.

2. Mizugi Kanojo, by Bosshi
もしかしてこれはとんでもないものを目覚めさせたかーっ！！
Did you mean this is going to wake up - I made that ridiculous! !

I don't think I even need to go into detail how awful and inaccurate these translations are. It looks like Google is much stronger at going from English to Japanese than vice versa, even if the English to Japanese isn't all that awesome either.

 

[guy]

Google was one of the worst for automated Japanese-English translations.

However, as is typical for Google, they are quickly discovering how to correct their service without having to invest in a lot of complicated algorithms.

If you use translate.google.com to translate an entire webpage (paste in a url rather than plaintext), you can now mouse-over the translated text and a tooltip will pop up with the original text. If the translation is inaccurate, you can easily type into the tooltip a better translation.

As you can imagine, with millions of small suggestions, Google will (soon?) be able simply search for the best translation based on which translations are the most common given the context, much like how it already does with traditional webpage searches.

But until we see that happen, there is currently no replacement for a real translator with a proper education in both Japanese and English. There are simply too many oddities in Japanese (adaptations of meanings from Chinese, modern loan words from English/French/German, regional idioms, etc) for any machine translation to be effective.

 

[buttobi]

そもそも正しい日本語を書ける日本人自体が少ないのに、ウェブ翻訳にそれが可能だと期待することが間違っている気がします。日本語は本当に厄介な言葉です。　しかし、日本人でも無理なら外人は正しく話せなくて当たり前と考えれば気が楽です。よほど意味が通じなければ別ですが、日本人は自分の日本語が完璧ではないのをよく知っていますから、間違いは大目に見てくれるはずです。

If you find a web engine　that is able to translate the above Japanese, you can perfectly rely on it. :evillaugh:

 

[gakido]

^ <(_ _)> all great points and facts. With any language one cannot learn everything but especially with Chinese and Japanese, each and every conversation there's a 99% of the time you'll pick a new Kanji or a new vocabulary.

There are no exact prefect translation, you can only hope to just understand the literal meaning of what you read with a language like Chinese and Japanese. That's just me though.

To me translating tools (Google, Atlas, etc) often confused and make you second guessed yourself more often that not.

p.s. wow, buttobi you're Japanese is great. Just wondering it is all self-learn? o: I wish I can write as fluently as you one day.

 

[Cloud187]

shit so does this mean i am doomed :crash:

or is there some other way ?, and BTW how the hell do all of you know japanese so well XD dammit i need to learn it how long does it take ?

 

[Sakunyuusha]

What this means is that you will not be able to write a letter to somebody in English and then have a computer program accurately translate it into Japanese. It's as simple as that.

Everybody is different. I studied it in college. Some people live(d) in Japan and picked it up there. Some people lived overseas but learned it growing up from Japanese parents.

Everybody is also different with regards to how easy or difficult they find learning Japanese to be, what specific aspects of the language they find easiest or hardest to understand, and how badly they want to or need to learn the language. I have known people to drop out of college Japanese after one semester and I have known people to have semi-fluent conversations with the head of the Japanese department after only 3 years of college study.

As is true of any goal in life, the two most important measures of your success will be the degree to which you want to learn Japanese and the degree to which you have to learn Japanese.

 

[buttobi]

Cloud187, give me the sentences you'd want to have translated into Japanese and I'll do it for you this once. You can rely on me more than any web translator. In fact I write Japanese much better than an average Japanese. :dozingoff:

 

[runwr]

そもそも正しい日本語を書ける日本人自体が少ないのに、ウェブ翻訳にそれが可能だと期待することが間違っている気がします。日本語は本当に厄介な言葉です。　しかし、日本人でも無理なら外人は正しく話せなくて当たり前と考えれば気が楽です。よほど意味が通じなければ別ですが、日本人は自分の日本語が完璧ではないのをよく知っていますから、間違いは大目に見てくれるはずです。

If you find a web engine　that is able to translate the above Japanese, you can perfectly rely on it. :evillaugh:

But i'm chinese, so ...

 

[BartSimpson]

But i'm chinese, so ...

Really? Could you do me a little favor then?

I found a Chinese site with guitar tabs (GuitarPro files: *.gp) but apparently you have to register to download them...

...well I tried, but I cant put in the friggn birthdate :crash: (I even changed my keyboard layout to chinese and tried to type a Chinese-calender date...didnt work)

EDIT: It seems to work with Internet Explorer but Im getting an error message ->

what does that mean?



EDIT 2: lol, looks like it worked...I can download it now

 

[withheld]

That's not an error message. That's saying that you've registered successfully.

 

[isityours]

simply, the best translation possible is done by humans. when this is not possible or practical then i can just recommend keeping your sentences short and simple and staying away from slang and colloquialisms. i have had acceptable results with 'excite' honyaku エキサイト翻訳　and yahoo and other big sites tools can be effective. it could also be an idea to translate the whole text on 2 or 3 different sites and send them all. regarding google i found it the least accurate with 3 control sentences. although the suggestions function is a good idea i think it is still too early to function effectively.