A long way to go

[banjoplayinnerd]

Lately I have been messing around with Esperanto, which like several other hobbies I picked up as a young man and had to drop when I got married and started raising a family. If you've heard of it, it's probably in the context of "it's a language that everyone in the world was supposed to learn to speak, but nobody speaks it any more" or some such

Comments

[banjoplayinnerd]

You can always cut and paste into Google Translate. Thai is one of the languages they list. I don't know what mechanism Facebook uses for translation, or whether Google's translations from Thai are any good.

Mark Twain once published the result of his re-translation into English of a French translation of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which he obtained by consulting a dictionary and being fairly literal about the process. Sometimes Google's translations remind me of that exercise.

[banjoplayinnerd]

Sure, I'd love to. Esperanto poetry has been around since before the publication of the First Book. Zamenhof used translation of texts from a number of languages, including poems, as a way of finding the seams and rough edges of his language and smoothing them out, something that to my knowledge creators of other would-be international languages did not do and a reason why Esperanto has outlived them all.

[dan_ad_nauseam]

The GT algorithm is based on searching the web corpus for translations of the same or similar passages. One of the flaws of the algorithm is that it does not exclude GT translations.

One bit of advice I recently read is that if you don't know the target language well, GT may not be helpful. The implication is that if your instinct is that the translation is wrong, it may well be.