Google Translates Gender

Feb 13, 2012 by

Google Translates Gender

[Thanks to David Pesetsky for inspiring this post] The topics of Google Translate and of translating gender have been discussed in this blog before. I have argued that Google Translate fails to understand language (as many journalists...

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On Google Translate, again

Sep 17, 2011 by

On Google Translate, again

In a couple of postings last winter (see here and here), I already discussed Google’s machine translation tool, Google Translate (GT) and expressed my skepticism about it. Today, another article on GT by David Bellos from The...

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Are there "universal truths" about language?

Apr 26, 2011 by

In several recent postings, I’ve discussed two studies recently conducted in New Zealand: one on the origins of human language by Quentin D. Atkinson and colleagues published in Science, and the other on the origins of the...

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Google Translate and Humor

Feb 9, 2011 by

In yesterday’s posting I talked about Google Translate and its (in)ability to handle even such simple texts such as a short nursery rhyme that I attempted translating from Russian into several other languages. What about other...

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Will “Google Conversation” really converse?

Feb 8, 2011 by

Last month, Google unveiled its latest innovation, an app for phones that can near-simultaneously translate speech from one language to another. “Google Conversation” is so far only available to translate between Spanish...

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On Finno-Ugric languages

Jan 13, 2011 by

The Mari language, discussed in yesterday’s posting, is one of the Finno-Ugric languages, spoken in parts of Scandinavia and the Baltic region, Hungary, central Volga region and as far east as the eastern slopes of the Ural...

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