Think of this as a followup to our thread from last December about Searle’s Chinese Room problem. However, the cartoon there came from the Daily Nous site, where everything is supposed to be philosophy (or usually institutional news); this one graced the pages of GoComics.
How lucky that the randomly-generated sounds coming from Man2 actually constituted correct directions to the Post Office!
But how unlucky, as Man1 actually wanted to go to the metro!
Comics I Don't Understand 
Brilliant!
Also lugubrious, overblown, and tedious. But still brilliant!
I see this as an attempt to satirize chatbot customer service.
You ask a question, and the chatbot returns an English sentence that contains a word or so from your question, but is useless. Perhaps with a few more queries you will finally get an answer that is almost right, but not quite — instead of directions to the post office rather than the metro, it tells you where the setting is in version 4.2 of the app [step1 > step2 > step3> step4], when you’ve got version 5.1 and need to get to a different spot.
After a couple panels, I realized this works best as a Monty Python sketch.
As it not usual, I am vectoring off to tell some tale that interests me. It might or might interest anyone else. I read an anthology of Steampunk stories. One of them was titled: “Flying Fish ‘Prometheus'”. This was actually an old Verne-style science-fiction story “Flyvefisken ‘Prometheus’ written by Danish entomologist Vilhelm Bergsøe, inspired by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. As it was public domain, a translation was done and used as a story, even though not technically alternate-history.
It is set 100 years later, as the Americans are getting ready to open the Panama Canal. This future world runs on steam, big time, and explosive stuff. The narrator receives an offer to attend by catching a ride on the titular Flying Fish aircraft. In the story, the USA and UK went to war some years before. Spoiler Alert: didn’t go well for the Brits.
Anyway I got the urge to run the original text through the Google Translator to see how it compared to the one in the book. Here is the opening passage, in various forms.
(Original Danish) Kære Ven! Du bliver maaske lidt forundret over at modtage Brev fra Madegassernes Land, skrevet i en tropisk Hede paa Biskop Kings skyggefulde Veranda — men saadanne er nu Verdens Omskiftelser! I vore Dage bør man ikke undre sig længere; gør man det, viser det blot, at man ikke følger med Tiden. Erindrer du vort sidste Møde i det herlige Isphana, hvortil Frederiksberg Have og Søndermarken er bleven omdannet. Jeg husker, som var det i Gaar, denne mageløse Aften, da vi sad paa Slotspavillonens flade Tag og til Tonerne af Avantis Damp-Orkester nød vore Nikotin-Cigaretter.
(Book) MY DEAR OLD friend, You must be a little surprised to receive a letter from Madagascar, written in the tropical heat on Bishop King’s shady veranda—but that’s the way things change in this world now! In our day, one must not be surprised any more. If you are, it just shows that you aren’t keeping up with the times. Do you recall our last meeting in Frederiksberg Park, after it had been converted to those wonderful Persian gardens? I remember it as though it were yesterday, that incomparable evening when we sat on the palace pavilion’s flat roof and enjoyed our nicotine-cigarettes to the sounds of Avanti’s Steam Orchestra.
(Google from Danish) Dear friend! You may be a little surprised to receive a letter from the Land of the Gassers, written in a tropical heat on Bishop King’s shady porch — but such are the vicissitudes of the world now! Nowadays one should not wonder anymore; if you do, it just shows that you are not keeping up with the times. Do you remember our last meeting in the glorious Isphana, into which Frederiksberg Have and Søndermarken have been transformed. I remember as if it were yesterday, this incomparable evening, when we sat on the flat roof of the palace pavilion and enjoyed our nicotine cigarettes to the tunes of Avanti’s steam orchestra.
On a whim, I also translated from Norwegian and Swedish, just to see what would happen.
(Google from Norwegian) Dear Friend! You may be a little surprised to receive a letter from the Land of the Madegas, written in a tropical heath on Bishop King’s shady veranda – but such are the changes of the world now! Nowadays, one should no longer be surprised; if you do that, it simply shows that you are not keeping up with the times. Do you remember our last meeting in the lovely Isphana, into which Frederiksberg Have and Søndermarken have been converted. I remember, as if it were yesterday, this stomach-churning evening, when we sat on the flat roof of the Palace Pavilion and to the sounds of Avanti’s Steam Orchestra enjoyed our nicotine cigarettes.
(Google from Swedish) Dear Friend! You may be a little surprised to receive a letter from the Land of the Madegas, written in a tropical heath on Bishop King’s shadowy porch — but such are the vicissitudes of the world! Nowadays, one should not wonder anymore; if you do that, it just shows that you are not keeping up with the times. Do you remember our last meeting in the glorious Isphana, into which Frederiksberg Have and Søndermarken were transformed. I remember, as if it were yesterday, this stomachless evening, when we sat on the flat roof of the Palace Pavilion and to the tunes of the Avanti Steam Orchestra we needed nicotine cigarettes.
I knew the Scandinavian languages were similar, but didn’t expect this close of translations. Although mageløse, Danish for incomparable translating as either stomach-churning or stomachless was amusing. Actually translating just the word comes up with stomachless for both, so there must have been something in context that changed it for Norwegian in the sentence. A few other oddities like heat/heath.
BTW, it should have said, “As is not unusual . . .” I do that sort of thing frequently.
Last century, The Kids in the Hall did a cute sketch where David Foley (News Radio) plays a shopkeeper who says “I’m sorry. I’d love to be of assistance to you, but I’m afraid I speak no English…”
@ target4cactus (6) – Alan Booth recounted a charming anecdote in “The Roads to Sata“, in which a Japanese innkeeper listed a long series of objections about why she was unable to offer a room to a “gaijin” (foreigner) such as Booth, including the exclusively Japanese food that she had in stock, and a lack of any slippers or kimonos in his size. Her final reason was that she could not speak any English, to which Booth replied that this shouldn’t be a problem, because the two of them had already been speaking Japanese for the past five minutes.
P.S. @ Brian (5) – Machine translations are absolutely unpublishable for any serious purpose, unless they have been reviewed and corrected by a native speaker. However, for quick and dirty work, I have found that Bing’s translator generally offers better results. The only advantage of Google is that it has a better list of languages, including useful items such as Latin, instead of silly toys like Klingon.
Here’s a related sketch
Machine translations are absolutely unpublishable for any serious purpose
Certainly one wouldn’t use them in a professional capacity. That being said, the translators have made significant progress over the years I’ve been using them.
My dad worked on two machine translation projects. One in the 1950s, for, um, The Government (think: three-letter agency beginning with C and ending with A), the second in the mid-60s for IBM. Both were complete failures, but I do wish he was alive to see Google Translate, which would impress him. But of course Brian is right–nobody would use them without review. OTOH I suspect that professional translators likely use them as a first pass, to save a lot of time on the easy stuff.
Related: When he was on the first project, he was there as The Linguist. He would describe what he wanted a program to do; a programmer would write it out on Autocoder sheets; a keypunch operator would input it; and the next day or so he’d find out why it didn’t work.
He realized that if he learned to program, he could cut out a step and get more done. So he did. Which he then parlayed into a career of teaching computing for Arts students (text processing), and also wrote an extensive suite that produced concordances of many scholarly works. Kind of a fun progression.
He also kept in practice with translation, working freelance for a CIA (oops, I typed it out) front. He said it wasn’t nearly as exciting as you might think: the most interesting item he ever worked on was a memo from the Czech embassy that had been torn up, thrown away, and taped back together. But the content wasn’t earth-shattering.
If you’ve read Six Days of the Condor or seen the movie “Three Days of the Condor” or watched the recent series “Condor”, that’s the kind of outfit he worked for. Minus, ya know, the everybody-getting-killed part! But I distinctly remember seeing the movie with him when it was released and him saying afterward that it felt a lot like where he’d worked doing translations. Made me laugh, then and now, because he was the ultimate academic–not at all suited to running around being chased by assassins.
Phil, I once took (early 1980s) a computational Linguistics class from Victor Yngve, many years after he was part of some of those big early (1950s/60s) machine translation projects. We had programming exercises in FORTH, which was relatively low-level. Fancier text manipulation (as for Stylistics), though we only glanced at it, used SNOBOL, whose manual was sort of famous for being literate and amusing.
The Hewlett-Packard article comparing programming languages to automobile models calls Forth “a go-kart”.
P.S. The programmer’s instructions for “shooting feet” lists for Snobol: “You grab your foot with your hand and rewrite your thumb to be a bullet”.