Actually, the real problem lies in the assumption made who knows when, by people who made translation dictionaries, that such dictionaries need contain only words and their translations.

There is a simple, albeit time consuming, way around this problem. Translate the entire phrases. With this approach, much of literature would still be lost in translation, as there is just no way to preserve eloquentness, but it would prevent 99% of the outright sillyness translators currently in use give forth.

This is *DEFINITLY* a task for distributed computing. Altavista's systrans webpage would be a good place to start, for example. If such could be reimplemented so that a user could recommend "alternate" translations or even, just rate how well a page was translated, such a phrase index could begin to be built.



---
sinck wrote:
There's a problem with doing what you suggest.  Well, more than one,
but we'll forgo verb tensing, syntax, false cognates, typo handling,
and a host of others and deal with one everyone can grasp and is fun:
idioms.

Idioms are the magic that makes a language colorful.  "You're a pain
in the ass" does not literally translate to the concept of you being
a tender spot on a mule.  However, stupid translators will translate
it that way...and miss.

So, unless the Dragon article has gone *way* deep, it's just a crude
approximation of a real language.  Crude approximations can be hacked,
but leave plenty of room for doubt.

You can code an amusing "little" perl script in ~20 lines of driver
code + X number of substitution lines to do a stupid translation.  But
what happens when you type in a word the translator doesn't know?  Or
you pull a typo?  Or proper names?  

So....  It's amusing as a thought, but I don't think it's a go unless
Dragon did it right, and that is a pain.

As an alternate you could try Klingon.  There are whole books and
probably several things online to help with the proper pronuncian of
'gahk'.  It wouldn't suprise me if someone even coded the phenomes for
you.  

I'll be happy to gen the wrapper script, but you'd have to cope with
typing in valid perl expressions to do the substitutions.

David





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