[CT] Re: Cable Artifacting

[Daniel Moran]

FYI:

http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:6JKFtnq3XvwC:ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/WJHutchins/PPF-1.doc+machine+translation+vodka+harper%27s&hl=en

It would seem that a likely source was an article by John A.Kouwenhoven 
"The trouble with translation" in Harper's Magazine for August 1962:

Our own attempts to communicate with the Russians in their language may be 
no more successful. Thanks to Robert E. Alexander, the architect, I can 
pass along this cheering bit of news. According to Colonel Vernon Walters, 
President Eisenhower's official interpreter, some electronic engineers 
invented an automatic translating machine into which they fed 1,500 words 
of Basic English and their Russian equivalents, claiming that it would 
translate instantly without the risk of human error. In the first test they 
asked it to translate the simple phrase: ?Out of sight, out of mind.? Gears 
spun, lights blinked, and the machine typed out in Russian ?Invisible 
Idiot.? On the theory that the machine would make a better showing with a 
less epigrammatic passage, they fed it the scriptural saying: ?The spirit 
is willing, but the flesh is weak.? The machine instantly translated it, 
and came up with ?The liquor is holding out all right, but the meat has 
spoiled.?

It is a good story, but its superficial plausibility is damaged by the lack 
of any evidence of a US system at the time which could translate from 
English into Russian ? for obvious reasons the Americans wanted to 
translate from Russian into English ? and by the discovery that both 
examples were familiar apocrypha of translation before there were any 
machine translation systems in operation. For example, in April 1956, 
E.H.Ullrich was reported as saying:

Perhaps the popular Press is the most attractive outlet for mechanical 
translations, because it does not really matter whether these are right or 
wrong and amusing versions such as "the ghost wills but the meat is feeble" 
might make mechanical translation into a daily feature as indispensible as 
the cross-word puzzle. (Ullrich 1956)


At 08:06 PM 6/3/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>That tale was circulating in the AI/language processing field in the early 
>1970s, which was pretty soon after the field was plowed.  But it actually 
>has been traced back to 1956 -- with human translators.
>         http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/WJHutchins/Myths.htm
>("Invisible idiot" was considered old in 1963 and reportedly was in 
>elementary Chinese textbooks)
>
>Ray Lee wrote:
>
>>I prefer the anecdote about the phrase "The spirit is willing, but the
>>flesh is weak," being (computer) translated into and back from Russian.
>>The (possibly urban legend) result: "The vodka is strong, but the meat
>>is raw."
>
>
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