As the technology develops, scientists are trying to improve machine translators' performances. A perfect translator device would be very useful as language and communication is such an important part in men's life.
Babelfish, a web-based application on Yahoo!, is one of the most popular machines translators. If we human beings weren't so lazy, we wouldn't need such thing as babelfish: we should just look up the words in the dictionary and use our common sense or/and basic knowledges to do the translation.
I don't think computers will ever be able to translate or, at least, I hope so: translating is an activity that requires a lot of different skills: a very good knowledge of the languages, an understanding of the topic of the test you have to translate, the ability of recreating the same style of the test but in another language. These skills are a human mind prerogative, and that's the way it should always be.
I don't think be should rely too much on the machines. What makes mankind different from other animals is the ability to think: we have survived in this world so far thanks to that. Teaching a machine to think could be dangerous and is pointless, because it's something we human can do pretty well.
My mother is a translator and she actually enjoy translating. It's harder than it seems, though. I remember her wondering about the perfect italian word to describe an english one. I learned from her that translation is a hard work because you have to think. "Think" is such a short word to describe such a complex action and that's the whole point: words alone can't perfectly describe reality or feelings: the human mind needs to do some work with them to deliver their meaning to other people, and that's something a machine can't do.
I agree with you, but why is it that machines can't translate. Where exactly do they get hung up? (Hint: irony, metaphor, ambiguity, etc.)
RispondiElimina