Google translate has Haitian Creole but not Latin? No offense to Haitian Creole, but Latin seems like a pretty important language to be lacking. Anyone know a site for translating from Latin?
I don't think you're actually supposed to translate it from "Latin" to English. Jason has essentially plugged a handful of meaty keywords from the past few months of frothing-mouthed punditry into a piece of bog-standard lorem ipsum text.
OK, here, I'll translate:
"You've already heard everything you need to about the iPad. It's been covered by everyone from the Today Show to Stephen Colbert to David Pogue from the New York Times, and your mom even has an opinion.
You either made up your mind to buy one or not the second you saw Steve Jobs hold it aloft in Moses-like fashion back in January. Why are you even bothering to read real reviews? You've known exactly what they're going to say for months."
Perhaps you should also look at the number of people who speak Haitian Creole and the number of people who speak Latin.
Then, you may also want to look at the number of people who speak Haitian Creole as their primary (or only) language and compare that with the numbers for Latin.
That may give you a better appreciation for the reasoning behind Google-Translate's prioritization (though I should add that I'd also be surprised if they didn't include Latin)
And even people who don't have internet access at home can go to an internet shop, translate and print a bunch of documents, and take them home to read offline. So Google is potentially benefitting millions of people by providing this service.
You should look at how many people who speak Haitian Creole have access to computers and the internet and compare that with people who speak Latin and have access to the net.
The number of historical texts people are putting online in both languages should count for something as well. After all, I'm more likely to use Google Translate if I can't find a native speaker to translate it with localization.
The text is based on the infamous Lorem Ipsum [1] placeholder text, which is pseudo-Latin gibberish, so I doubt you'd get anything out of the translation if it existed.
It's very hard to algorithmically translate Latin, a lot harder than other languages. It is an ancient language that was used differently throughout the ages. Obviously the old Latin from the time when Rome was just a kingdom in the Italian Peninsula, the Latin of Virgil, the Latin of medieval laws and the Latin used today in the Vatican are very different from each other, not grammatically or in vocabulary but in idioms, methaphores, etc., stuff that really make a language unique. It is hard enough even for humans to translate old Latin texts sometimes.
Still, I don't doubt that the clever people at Google would be able to manage to do it, I'm just saying that it's a lot harder than translating from or to a modern language.
I have only studied 4 years of latin in high school, but I imagine it would be particularly difficult to create an effective translator for latin. I'm no expert though (only substantive works I translated were book 2 of the Aeneid and some satire by Juvenile).
Indeed.