[Yr11 Information Technology] Re: Google Foreign Language Translator

[Steven Bird]

2009/7/21  <yr11it-request at edulists.com.au>:
> Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:10:08 +1000
> From: Mark Kelly <kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [Yr11 Information Technology] Google Foreign Language Translator

> I usually demonstrate the drawbacks of electronic translation by getting
> the software to translate some text to (say) French and then back into
> English.  The results are usually amusing.

Thanks for this opportunity to plug my new book...

Note that there's a couple of examples of this in the "machine
translation" section of chapter 1 of Natural Language Processing with
Python: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596516499/

The supplied software that takes a sentence and repeatedly translates
it back and forth between the source and target languages.  The book
and software are available for free from http://www.nltk.org/

This material is part of a new second year "breadth" subject at
Melbourne University, called Language and Computation:
https://app.portal.unimelb.edu.au/CSCApplication/view/2009/800-204

-Steven Bird
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/