dear systran: you suck

[rone]

Go to Google Translate and translate "For your information" into any language other than Japanese or Chinese.  You'll see the same results on Babelfish.  I find this a rather baffling error.

Comments

[pvaneynd]

Well. I once worked for a competitor of systran and they have a pretty dim view of their technology. What they told me is that it is pretty much a pattern patcher written in 390 assembler at a time. If the pattern isn't known you get no translation.

Knowing that my former company had a parser that would analyze the sentence, generate a tree-representation of the structure of the sentence, and then translate the tree into the other language, taking into account the properties of the other language you can understand their amusement at problems like this. Their parse could even propagate sex information between different parts of the sentence (the subject is female, so we have to translate this word to that or the 'vous' isn't plural, but the polite form, so use 'U' as a translation instead of 'zij'). The problem of course is that if your original sentence was junk you would get no translation at all.

As far as I know the system was used in the past to translate a big spanish newspapers from one form of spanish into the other with only light manual editing at the other end.