Why not create an automatic translator that took into account that certain words have specific connotations, multiple meanings, multiple spellings, spellings close to other words, could be used in different contexts, have similar meanings to other words, etc?
For instance, "unwanted" and "undesirable" have the same basic denotation (definition), but can mean two VERY different things - "unwanted" implies more that something simply isn't wanted, whereas "undesirable" implies that something really, really, really isn't wanted.
And "may" can have several different meanings as well - as in, "May I...?" (a questioning word), "May you ___." (Expressing a hope that the described thing afterwards happens), and of course, the merry month of May (Mai in German, Mayo in Spanish, etc.). Similarly, "can" can have a similar meaning to one of "may"'s meanings, but also can mean a metal container, or even "to fire someone from a job" (additionally, "fire", can mean to terminate someone's employment, to use a projecticle weapon, to bake something in an oven such as ceramics, or of course, to mean "flames")!
This is the single biggest cause that I see for the inaccuracies so often found in automatic translators - the multiple meanings of words, the different contexts they can be used, even the types of words they can be ("fire" can be a noun or a verb; so can "may" or "can"). The translation pages/programs I've used in the past almost always fail to take these things into account, and therefore, they provide some VERY screwed-up translations.
Why did this bug me so much? Well, it's mostly the fact that something like this:
"My baby is a basket case, all decked out in leather and lace." (those are lyrics from a rock song, by the way)
Becomes something like this once back-translated:
"My baby is an arm amputee missing both legs, all decorated in leather and shoelaces."
(Yes, that's roughly the same as I once got in the back-translation when I tried those lyrics in an English-German translator)
And I'd like to be a part of something that you know, didn't do that?
So anyway, I was wondering if people fluent in other languages, or people good with Javascript, would be willing to help out with this kind of translator?
I was thinking that every translation it brought up would have footnotes that explained certain parts and how they could be translated differently.
Like, in the lyrics "My baby is a basket case, all decked out in leather and lace", it would note that baby and lace have multiple meanings, etc. And of course, give you a back-translation, so you could see if anything turned out really, really squirrely like that.
What do you guys think? I'm especially interested right now in a English-Spanish and Spanish-English translator, as it's the only foreign language whose grammar I have much familiarity with, it's fairly simple (relatively speaking; no language is 100% easy of course, but for me, I've noticed that Spanish is the easiest for me to learn so far), and I'm planning to take it in college this fall anyway.
Plus, with so many native speakers of the language, especially with how many of them are bilingual, it makes sense for the beta version to be Spanish-English/English-Spanish, because it'll be a little easier to test it.
-Runa27
