Tuesday, February 09, 2016

'Playboy', Bing?

So, today Petro Poroshenko posted this:
Сьогодні урочисту присягу складають бійці Управління спеціальних операцій - це дуже важливий етап у створенні НАБУ.

Висловлюю повну політичну підтримку зусиллям Національного антикорупційного бюро. Ніхто в нашій країні не застрахований від того, аби опинитися в полі прискіпливої уваги детективів бюро.

Жодні зв'язки не дають індульгенції і захисту!

You can see Bing's effort:
Today urochystu oath form fighters special operations management is very important milestone in creating nabu.
Vyslovlyuyu full political support to the National Antykoruptsiynoho Bureau. Nobody in our country not guarantees from here to find myself in the field pryskiplyvoyi attention detectives office.
None relationships playboy inhul'hentsiyi and protection!
And here's Google's version:
now make a solemn oath to the soldiers of the Special Operations - a very important stage in the creation of NABU.

I express my full political support to the efforts of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau. No one in our country is immune from what was to be a meticulous attention Detective Bureau.

No links do not give indulgence and protection!
Google can't tell when 'today' means 'nowadays' or really 'today', but that would be asking quite a lot. Unfortunately, 'soldiers' isn't in the dative, but the nominative - they're the ones making the oath. Google also disregarded the capital letter on 'Directorate' and chose to leave it out - they're soldiers of the Special Operations Directorate. Also, it's "from what will be" and "OF the detectives OF the bureau". And the required double negative defeats it when it comes to good English - 'No links (or, better, connections) will give'.

Bing, on the other hand ... Wow. Not only does it not recognize  Antykoruptsiynoho as being Anticorruption or indul'hentsiyi as 'indulgence',  it gets messed up by oblique cases of adjectives, genitive constructions with nouns, and several things about verbs mess it up badly. For instance, its algorithm tells it that -sya (reflexive) verbs are "... myself" whether that makes sense or not. It can't tell a passive participle from an active verb (застрахований means 'to be insured against, immune from, protected from'): 'nobody not guarantees' is, double negative aside, quite different from 'nobody not guaranteed'. Errr, 'nobody is guaranteed'. 

But mainly. WHAT THE  HECK is 'playboy' doing in there? How does the verb дають, 'they give', turn into 'playboy'? I mean, if you plug 'playboy' into ABBYY Lingvo, it offers  you плейбой, джиґун, ледар, марнотратник життя; reversing that gives you, respectively, nothing (it's just 'pleyboy'), ladies' man, idler, spendthrift (literally 'waster, squanderer of life'. There's no reason whatsoever for 'playboy' to be in that sentence.

ps - for Kathie... yes, I'm surely tempted "not to change the output" here; a "decision to leave it alone" would be more than just "frustrating".

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1 Comments:

At 9:49 AM, February 09, 2016 Anonymous Kathie had this to say...

See answer to question #3:
http://caroltranslation.com/2016/02/01/greatest-women-in-translation-muriel-vasconcellos

The interviewee's problem is that it's not merely a matter of style, but of meaning. Without accurate meaning, even the best style renders the work irrelevant.

 

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