Vladimir_M comments on Off-topic: Russian machine translation - Less Wrong

0 Post author: thomblake 16 May 2011 08:12PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_M 16 May 2011 09:39:55PM 3 points [-]

I can read Russian with some difficulty, and occasionally I use machine translation for help when I get stuck with the vocabulary. I've tried several translation web pages (basically the ones that come up when you google for Russian translators), but I haven't observed any that would perform noticeably better than Google Translate. Sometimes you might have better luck with one website or another, but I haven't observed any systematic patterns.

The problem is that the syntactic constructs of Russian, a much more synthetic language than English, are much harder to match with their English equivalents automatically compared with the (modern) Germanic or Romance languages, and possibly even in comparison with some non-Indo-European analytic languages.