Íarnóta amháin eile

[ap_aelfwine]

And in the face of needing to write a paper in Irish in the not too distant future, I decided I needed immediate writing practice. And I remembered that I'd had a plan since some time ago to write an Irish-language version of one of the shorter fics I've written in my life: "Her Best Friend's Girlfriend

Comments

[dukebrymin]

But even more importantly, we get more of "Her Best Friend's Girlfriend"! What could be more exciting than that!

It's rather strange, sometimes, writing in a foreign language. It's been awhile since I was fluent (have to think much more about it now), but even now I know that Google Translate only does a half-fast job of it. Do they even do Irish?

Anyway, hope your Christmas was well.

-duke

[ap_aelfwine]

Thank you! Christmas was quiet, but good. I hope yours was well, also.

But even more importantly, we get more of "Her Best Friend's Girlfriend"! What could be more exciting than that!

Thanks! I'll be putting both versions up in a few minutes, assuming all goes well.

It's rather strange, sometimes, writing in a foreign language. It's been awhile since I was fluent (have to think much more about it now), but even now I know that Google Translate only does a half-fast job of it. Do they even do Irish?They do, but it's terrible. The grammar doesn't lend itself to machine translation, I think, although then again it seems just as bad when I use Google Translate to get the gist of Russian or Japanese, so maybe it doesn't work for any language beyond being just enough

[dukebrymin]

One of the more interesting articles I've read in the last while was on the unreasonable effectiveness of huge data. Its postulate was that as the amount of accessible text increases (i.e. people writing things on the Internet and such), then the job of various text-processing heuristics becomes easier. As the amount of (for example) Swahili writings increases, then there are more (hopefully) valid examples of "correct" Swahili. And as that amount continues to grow, then eventually there would be an example of every possible sentence/paragraph/thought for (e.g.) Google Translate to cull from

[ap_aelfwine]

I think that's a gross oversimplification, but I think the basic idea is sound. So we just need a whole bunch of people to start writing things in Spanish, Swahili, Irish, Urdu, Quiche and so forth, so translation software has an easier time.

Maybe. It would be an interesting thing to try. I'd wonder how well it would ever handle dialect, but a large enough sample might do something. Of course, there's already huge amounts of stuff online, although previous generations of translation software (I've seen several fora offering Google translate versions in the couple of dozen languages available through Google translate, which makes searching doubly interesting, and I've even seen google translate versions of fiction put up on Archive,org,) might make it difficult for computers to separate the wheat for the chaff, as it were.

But I did spend two years in Uruguay (serving a mission for my church--The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, colloquially known as the Mormons) and was reasonably fluent within four months, and