Want a laugh? Read this re. missal translations

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I tested the Google translator by typing in “Sursum corda. Habemus ad Dominum.” Sure enough, it returned “Lift up your hearts. We have lifted them to the Lord.”

But when I changed the word order (in Latin it shouldn’t matter much) to “Corda sursum. Ad Dominum habemus.” it returned “Draw our hearts by. To the Lord: we have them.”

and prompted with “contribute a better translation.” I thought that was funny.
 
ProVobis said:
I tested the Google translator by typing in “Sursum corda. Habemus ad Dominum.” Sure enough, it returned “Lift up your hearts. We have lifted them to the Lord.”

But when I changed the word order (in Latin it shouldn’t matter much) to “Corda sursum. Ad Dominum habemus.” it returned “Draw our hearts by. To the Lord: we have them.”

and prompted with “contribute a better translation.” I thought that was funny.
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I wonder if the Google translator recognized the word order and jumped to a ready-made translation - a good one.

When you shifted the words around the Google translator didn’t recognize the word order and so did a transliteration of the words directly from Latin to English.

That was a very interesting and telling experiment you did.
 
roveau said:
I wonder if the Google translator recognized the word order and jumped to a ready-made translation - a good one.

When you shifted the words around the Google translator didn’t recognize the word order and so did a transliteration of the words directly from Latin to English.

That was a very interesting and telling experiment you did.
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Thanks.

Apparently the translator builds upon itself. It takes in all the articles and translations it finds and stores them into a “database” and assigns weights based on frequencies, word order, etc. And like wikipedia it allows you to enter in your own suggestions (interactive). Somebody must have written a nice bulky algorithm to return whatever it does. Still in its infancy. Should get better as more use it.

Perhaps I’ll try my experiment two months from now and check the return.
 
Well it’s obviously broken. “Et cum spiritu tuo” didn’t translate to anything even close to “and also with you.”
 
mattkubes said:
Well it’s obviously broken. “Et cum spiritu tuo” didn’t translate to anything even close to “and also with you.”
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That’s funny, what did it translate to?

I will go check right now real quick.

Scylla
 
Oops… It’s
Et cum spiritu tuo
And with your spirit

Hmm, your right it must be broken!
 
It seems to do really well on established Latin texts, but not so good on stuff you just make up.

“Agricola puellam amat” doesn’t come out right, but “In principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud deum, et verbum erat deus” does really well.
 
GIR said:
It seems to do really well on established Latin texts, but not so good on stuff you just make up.

“Agricola puellam amat” doesn’t come out right, but “In principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud deum, et verbum erat deus” does really well.
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No, but amat agricola puellam seems to come out pretty well. 😃
 
I’m curious, has anyone here replied when prompted by the “contribute a better translation” option?
 
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