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Re: Chinese "rap"

Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 3:30 pm
by anders
«同志», during the last century used as the egalitarian term of address «Comrade», but which now seems to have taken on a rather different - or let us say, more restricted - meaning
'Restricted' ain't quite what lotsa people think they are...

Anders

Feeling gay, in the more ancient meaning

Re: Chinese "rap"

Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 4:14 pm
by M. Henri Day
Feeling gay, in the more ancient meaning
I recall anecdotes, dating from three and one half decades ago when I was studying transformational grammar at the Uni, concerning a researcher who, not always terribly cognizant of English idiom - if I remember correctly, she was Czech - used to investigate the underlying grammar of variants of sentences like «All the people on the moon are gay.» She was said to be a great talent, very skilled in teasing out underlying structures, but never could quite understand the levity to which her examples invariably gave rise in the lecture room. (Remember that we're talking here about the late 60s/early 70s !)

Good to see, at any rate, that Anders is in a happy mood (for so I interpret his disclosure) and back on the Agora ! His contributions have been missed !...

Henri

Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 6:28 pm
by Stargzer
...

(Oh, that post window gets kinda ugly with all them thar chicken-scratches in them. :lol: )
. . .

Henri
Actually, what I was referring to is the 'Post a reply' window. When you do a refresh, all the Chinese gets re-written as escaped HTML, which I reproduce here by putting a space between the & and the #:
& #12356; & #12420; & #12289; & #20854; & #12398; & #20107; & #12399; & #12354; & #12426; & #12414; . . .
Try looking at a windowfull of that sometime!

Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 6:48 pm
by M. Henri Day
...
& #12356; & #12420; & #12289; & #20854; & #12398; & #20107; & #12399; & #12354; & #12426; & #12414; . . .
Try looking at a windowfull of that sometime!
Have to admit, Larry, that that particular pleasure could rapidly pale ! I am therefore most grateful that the Agora's code turns the «chicken scratches» of the Table de caractères Unicode into quite legible graphs, allowing both Flam (I hope !) and your humble interlocutor to sleep the sleep alleged to be vouchsafed those of good conscience...

Henri

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 12:19 am
by Stargzer
...
& #12356; & #12420; & #12289; & #20854; & #12398; & #20107; & #12399; & #12354; & #12426; & #12414; . . .
Try looking at a windowfull of that sometime!
Have to admit, Larry, that that particular pleasure could rapidly pale ! . . .
Henri

Well, your signature comes out OK in the initial copying to the Post a reply window, but hitting the Preview button returns it in the "&$.....;" gobbledygook.

Finally, clicking the Submit button posts it in the inscrutable original:
曾记否,到中流击水,浪遏飞舟?

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 8:13 am
by M. Henri Day
...
Finally, clicking the Submit button posts it in the inscrutable original:
曾记否,到中流击水,浪遏飞舟?
And I who had dared to hope that I had succeeded in making my signature a bit more scrutable on this thread !It just goes to show....

Henri

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 1:05 pm
by Stargzer
...
Finally, clicking the Submit button posts it in the inscrutable original:
曾记否,到中流击水,浪遏飞舟?
And I who had dared to hope that I had succeeded in making my signature a bit more scrutable on this thread !It just goes to show....

Henri
I hadn't seen that one before.
Do you yet remember the oath we swore, when in midstream the waves checked our flying boat ?
Systran makes it out to be:
Once recorded otherwise, struck the water to the average, the wave stopped flies the boat?
I'd rate them as close but no cigar. Maybe a bit of pipe tobacco as a consolation prize.

Taking your translation, Systran give us:
您记住我们发誓的誓言, 当在中途波浪检查了我们的飞行小船?
which even to me looks a bit different than your:
曾记否,到中流击水,浪遏飞舟?
And just for grins, performing a loopback by feeding Systran's Chinese back to itself:
You remember the pledge which we pledged, when has inspected our flight boat in the midway wave?

Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2005 11:51 am
by M. Henri Day
If I don't misremember, many years ago, long before this pastime became every-man's plaything, somebody - I think the US military - set up a machine which translated untouched by human hands (save for those of the girls who punched the punch cards). To demonstrate how well it worked, an English version of Matthaeus 26:41 («spiritus quidem promptus est caro autem infirma») was translated into Russian, and then back into English, with, it is claimed, the following result :
The liquor's good, but the meat's lousy.
So can it go....

Henri

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 3:44 pm
by Stargzer
If I don't misremember, many years ago, long before this pastime became every-man's plaything, somebody - I think the US military - set up a machine which translated untouched by human hands (save for those of the girls who punched the punch cards). To demonstrate how well it worked, an English version of Matthaeus 26:41 («spiritus quidem promptus est caro autem infirma») was translated into Russian, and then back into English, with, it is claimed, the following result :
The liquor's good, but the meat's lousy.
So can it go....

Henri
From what I hear, that was true of Soviet comestibles . . . when you could get them! :lol:

Business help in China

Posted: Mon Apr 03, 2006 10:51 pm
by john1956_u
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Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2006 9:27 am
by Perry
If I don't misremember, many years ago, long before this pastime became every-man's plaything, somebody - I think the US military - set up a machine which translated untouched by human hands (save for those of the girls who punched the punch cards). To demonstrate how well it worked, an English version of Matthaeus 26:41 («spiritus quidem promptus est caro autem infirma») was translated into Russian, and then back into English, with, it is claimed, the following result :
The liquor's good, but the meat's lousy.
So can it go....

Henri
Why are you treating this with such levity. If the devil can quote scriptures to his own purpose, why can't a machine ask for better feeding?

(Anyone remember the scene in I Robot where one of the robots trying to kill Will Smith during a high-speed chase declares, "You are experiencing an accident"?)

Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2006 4:13 pm
by anders
No to mention that I distinctly remember having seen in an article on machine translation and/or computational linguistics that the liquor/meat example is just an urban legend.

Anyone who has tried the stuff will realize that machinery never will be able to match us professional translators.

Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2006 11:34 pm
by Stargzer
. . . (Anyone remember the scene in I Robot where one of the robots trying to kill Will Smith during a high-speed chase declares, "You are experiencing an accident"?)
Now that you mention it, yes.

And going back over this translation territory reminds me of the psychic researcher who tried to capture a photograph of a ghost. His picture was severely underexposed; the spirit was willing but the flash was weak.

Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2006 8:59 am
by Perry
Wonderful pun Stargazer!

Even more fun than machine translations are children's Mondgreens. An example from yesterday. My pre-schooler explained to me that Pharoh told Mose and the children of Israel, "You will be Spanish if you don't bow down to me".

Also when Finding Nemo was still relatively new, making her around 3 at the time, she used to declare that, "this one fish in the lotion is a bad guy".