Caveat: Machine Translation for Your iPhone

This looks really amazing. 

I have some thoughts, however.  First, I’m not really up on how this works, these days, but 20 years ago I wrote my senior thesis in the field linguistics on syntax-related computational parsing issues that had a significant bearing on the field of machine translation, so I’m quite aware of the complexities involved.  I’m a big fan of google translate, too – but there are huge limitations. 

I would run out and get this app just for the novelty factor, except for two major issues that prevent me:

1)  I’m still 100% boycotting all things Apple.  Give me a few more years. 

2) Right now, it appears to only work for Spanish-English/English-Spanish, and I already got that app directly installed in my brain, during my time in Mexico in the 80’s.  And even if it was providing Korean-English, if the quality of the translation is similar to google translate (and I suspect it could only be worse, since google is state-of-the-art), then Korean-English is nowhere near the level of reliability or useability as, say, much more closely-related language pairs like Spanish-English – most of what you get out of google translate for Korean-English/English-Korean, in either direction, is still utter gobbledy-gook – just hints of meaning, essentially syntaxless strings of word-glosses.

(Hat tip Sullyblog)

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