tlhIngan Hol DalaDlaH'a' ?

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Cyberman tM

...I just tried the Bing translator as well - it's rather useless if you ask me. Unless you already know the words, it's going to mislead you - it translates "ja' " correctly as "tell", but "ja'taH" (continuous form) as "grunt"...
Unfortunately there isn't really a good automated translator available...

Yes, you think it would be better, since the Bing translation is in conjunction with CBS, Paramount, and the Klingon Language Institute.

[Cyberman tM]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Yes, you think it would be better, since the Bing translation is in conjunction with CBS, Paramount, and the Klingon Language Institute.

Yeah, regarding that I have to say that CBS/Paramount aren't exactly trustworthy resources of klingon (the writers, if they know the language exists, are likely to open a dictionary, put it on the floor, walk away ten feet and glance at it to see if they can read words. There ARE exceptions, of course - some actually take their time and contact the KLI or Marc Okrand. But show writers apparently rarely do.).

I'm not sure how much involvement the KLI really had with them - I know that some people from the mailing list have helped them improve the translator, but I think their main problem is that the language is too different from others to be automatically translated.
There's once been a good program that could translate single words (it was called pojwI' ), but even that couldn't translate whole sentences.
(For single words nowadays boQwI' might be a better try, a very good android app.)

I think the results on Bing would be better if they didn't try to create a "natural" translation.
Just tried it again, using "ghargh Sop" as input. Translation that came out was "most breed", which makes absolutely no sense.
Curiously, if you enter the words one at a time, it translates them just fine.
(ghargh: a worm used as food, Sop: to eat. Sentence means "He/She eats ghargh")

My guess is they're somehow trying to "understand" the sentence and not mechanically translate it.


Trying to stop ranting about that "translator", but seriously, you'd be better off to pick a few scrabble letters than using that.

For fun try this: enter a sentence, then add/remove a final dot. Sometimes it changes the entire translation...