This was presented to me today by a student asking me to help to put it into "good English".
I know when I'm beaten.

It was a double dictionary translation, starting out in Japanese, translated with a dictionary into Chinese and translated with another dictionary into English.

I have no clue what it's supposed to say.

quote:

Insurance membranes frozen to fresh the meal. In order to have their if not suited to the taste of some of their jerky in to the Japanese style soy sauce knife must also be fast so raw fish less cut of meat will not go type.

Suggestions?

This reminds me of a fun game I sometimes play, entering a sentence into a translation programme, then entering that translation into another for a different language, then another, then seeing if any sense can be made of the result, Often it's the same gibberish you've got there, but often funny.

Well, now. That's my point about translations, isn't it?

Not a clue, Bob. Sorry.

It's a problem with machine translation or translation when the translator doesn't know enough of the target language.

I think machine translations into and out of Chinese are particularly problematic given the current state of the art for other languages. Translating from Japanese > Chinese > English is pretty well guaranteed to produce an unintelligible result.

Maybe. However, I also think it's a problem with translating back and forth in a language.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
Maybe. However, I also think it's a problem with translating back and forth in a language.

But that's not what happened here - if you mean translated from language A to language B, then back to language A. Bob's example was translated from language A to language B then to language C by someone who doesn't know enough about language C and possibly also language B.

If that's not what I said (I thought it was), it's what I meant.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
If that's not what I said (I thought it was), it's what I meant.

What did you mean? Now I'm so confused I don't know where I am or what my name is.

I'm lost, too, Kalleh. What did you mean?

The two big problems with "dictionary" translation are:

1. A language is more than a dictionary. Another large component, besides vocabulary, is grammar. English, Mandarin, and Japanese all have different kinds of grammar.

2. The mapping between two words in two different languages is never 1 to 1.

quote:

I'm lost, too, Kalleh. What did you mean?

I have a habit of confusing people, don't I?

I only had meant that, in my very humble and rather inexperienced opinion (how's that for a qualification?), I think when you translate from one language to another and then to another, you have more problems than when you just translate from one to another. Does that make sense?

Here's an example where it worked: YouTube

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
I only had meant that, in my very humble and rather inexperienced opinion (how's that for a qualification?), I think when you translate from one language to another and then to another, you have more problems than when you just translate from one to another. Does that make sense?

Yes, I agree with that.

However, I don't think that's the problem with the text Bob was given. I could be wrong but it seems to me that the student just translated each word with a dictionary, with no consideration for what made sense for the passage as a whole.