LINGUIST List 21.2250 Tue May 18 2010 Qs: Auto versus Human Translation Relay Experiment Editor for this issue: Danielle St. Jean <daniellelinguistlist.org> We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate. In addition to posting a summary, we'd like to remind people that it is usually a good idea to personally thank those individuals who have taken the trouble to respond to the query. To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm. Directory         1.    Sai Emrys, Auto versus Human Translation Relay Experiment Message 1: Auto versus Human Translation Relay Experiment Date: 16-May-2010 From: Sai Emrys <conlangssaizai.com> Subject: Auto versus Human Translation Relay Experiment E-mail this message to a friend Hello all, I am running a small experiment - mostly humorous, but it should have interesting results nonetheless - comparing an automatic translation relay (e.g. http://www.conveythis.com/translation.php) to an equivalent one done by actual professional human translators. This will be published - most likely in the Annals of Improbable Research, SpecGram, or the like - and all resulting data will be put online. If you're interested in participating and have done professional translation, please email conlangssaizai.com giving: 1. A list of the directional translations (* see note below) that you do (e.g. "English -> French, Spanish, Klingon; Spanish -> Arabic; French -> English"). 2. (Optional) A single shareable link to your credentials as a professional translator (so you can get due credit, and the write-up can accurately claim to be doing a reasonable comparison of professional vs auto translation). I'll figure out what chain we can do and email you the text from the preceding link. Ideally I'd like to see it go through at least 10 languages so there's enough mutation in both to be amusing and interesting. If you'd be interested in co-authoring a linguistic analysis and have a good sense of academic humor, please email me too. Thanks, - Sai Emrys http://saizai.com http://conlang.org P.S. If you find this interesting, you may also enjoy the tradition of conlang relays, where constructed language authors translate from the previous person's constructed language: http://dedalvs.conlang.org/relay/faq.html http://wiki.frath.net/Conlang_Relay * If it's not between English and one of the languages in the following list from Google Translate, please also give a link to a bidirectional autotranslator for the language pair. Google Translate List: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish Linguistic Field(s): Translation Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 18-May-2010       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.