Though I have seldom done anything to my own satisfaction, I am better satisfied with the translation of the New Testament than I ever expected to be. The language is, I believe, simple, plain, intelligible; and I have endeavored, I hope successfully, to make every sentence a faithful representation of the original.
Sometimes I look up a recipe for chicken and tomatoes and end up cooking pork. The inspiration gets lost in translation.
Walter Benjamin used to think that languages expand their register thanks to translation, because translation forces ways of using words and structures that were alien to the original speaker of the target language.
I feel French is very close to Urdu. Both languages are beautiful. Sadly, their beauty is lost in translation.
Want to train a machine translation system? Train it on a gazillion pairs of sentences of parallel corpora, and that creates a lot of breakthrough results. Increasingly, I'm seeing results on small data where you want to try to take in results even if you have 1,000 images.
In English, there is one word for sister. In Chinese, there are two separate words, for elder and younger sister. This is actually a translation problem because if you see the word sister, you don't know how to translate it to Chinese because you don't know if it's an elder sister or younger.
AI has been making tremendous progress in machine translation, self-driving cars, etc. Basically, all the progress I see is in specialised intelligence. It might be hundreds or thousands of years or, if there is an unexpected breakthrough, decades.
Apart from using it to spread the word about my translation company Blue Elephant and to talk to fans, I find social media an extremely powerful forum for charity.
I started a company in 2005 for language services called Blue Elephant. We handle translation and interpretation services in over 120 languages.
The truth is, I have an excellent team, a staff that handles Blue Elephant, my translation company, perfectly. It is like a well-oiled machine.
