It would be clever if google translate could recognize source material that matches it’s own and other machine translations too well, because that probably indicates that the text was already machine translated once, and would thus not be a useful contribution as to how humans translate.

Of course, the translation tool will still be useful for strictly literal translations, but not as much for literary ones, where allusion, wordplay/double meanings, and diction matter when creating multiple levels of meaning. A businessman might learn something useful; an arts student would be better up looking up that Longfellow.

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TS

I do note that the Google Translate has improved on their HTML handling though and have some safe HTML entity decoder embedded for re-rendering the return text. It works pretty well…

Now all I need to do is build in a more intelligent parser for inline HTML handling to ensure that HTML markup gets left alone and that the content is properly parsed and the original HTML context is not lost. That is the hard part of web translation services.

Zombie Bob

a) quantum gravitational processes are uncomputable;

and

b) quantum gravitiational processes might lie behind human consciousness;

thus

c) human consciousness cannot be understood by humans themselves.

To which my reaction is: mwah. Penrose is a superb mathemathician, but I think he’s taking some very fanciful steps here.

For one, as far as I understand decoherence prevents any quantum mechanical processes from manifesting on an everyday scale. So why *human* brains would suddenly have overcome this, and the brains of countless other species haven’t: well, I don’t see that.

Like you, I don’t think there’s anything ‘magical’, or ‘uncomputable’ about human thinking: there are some processes behind it we don’t fully comprehend (not sure if they’re supercomplicated Google algorithms, but I’d buy that over ‘intractable’ anytime), but will over time.

I mean if my thoughts are facilitated by quantum gravity, then all that headbanging in my youth should have completely demolished it. Still, I think. Or I think that I think. Have I become a Chinese Room?

And btw, good to have you reading and commenting on here now, Jetse. If I had known that all I needed to do to get your ear was mention Krokus, I would have done it a long time ago.

The end is near
As I get another beer.

(and that rhymes!)