At 05:58 AM 9/18/2006, Stone, Gary R. wrote:
>Greetings,
>
>
>
>Just wanted to share my experience - sorry if it is slightly off topic
>but wanted to let the group know because I know many of you are dx'ers.
>
>
>
>I wrote to a Russian ham on email with the question of setting up a try
>on 40 meter CW for my 5 band waz award. Well, I decided to include
>
>the Russian translation from a free translation page. Well, mistake big
>time. I will not print here in the email the result but will tell you
>to avoid such translation machines on the Internet.
There is a classic story (and probably urban legend) from the early
days of machine translation. The English phrase:
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
Was translated to Russian and back to English, coming out:
The vodka is strong and the meat is rotten.
There are high quality machine translaters out there, but they still
require care.
>
>
>I sent (in part) in English: "I think we should use CW and the time for
>best propagation would be 1145 UTC." Well, the translation page into
>Russian gave me something very different and unfortunately I had already
>sent it when I decided to check out the Russian in another page. Well,
>just plug in the above English into the following page for English to
>Russian and then paste the Russian back into the same page or another
>free translation page (I checked two of them with the same result) and
>you will not like what you see in English. (I hope the actual Russian I
>sent is not exactly the same)
Excellent... The danger of translating jargon blindly. At least it
didn't use propagation in the "growing" sense.. they might have
thought you're not just in the distribution phase, but also in the
production business.
> http://translation2.paralink.com/
>
>
>
>It translated my "CW" and "propagation" into something that could get me
>a visit by homeland security !!
We'll all be looking for you active from KG4 <grin>
{ Although, the folks doing this for a living have better translators
and use a lot of "side information" to interpret everyone's cryptic
comments. If you've ever read phone transcripts between two business
people discussing something they're both familiar with, you'd have a
similar problem.}
>
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