Machine Translation Humor Update
It has been sometime since I first wrote a blog post about MT humor primarily because I really have not been able to find anything worth the mention, until now, and except for some really lame examples about how MT mistranslates (sic) I have not seen much to laugh heartily at. It seems a group of people on the web have discovered the humorous possibilities of MT in translating song lyrics which might be difficult even for good human translators. (It really seems strange to be saying “human translator”.) I should point out that in all these recent cases one does have to work at degrading the translation quality by running the same text through a whole sequence of preferably not closely related languages. It has often surprised me that there are some in the MT industry who use “back translation” as a way to check MT quality, as from my vantage point it is an exercise that can only result in proving the obvious. MT back translation by definition should result in deterioration