Latest post in my blog on popular science:
Information and intelligence
https://populscience.blogspot.com/2023/11/information-and-intelligence.html
Regards,
Manuel, thanks for your post, and the fact that you mentioned automatic machine translation. When I translate scriptural meditations from the Russian book, “Day by Day”, I put a Google translation version next to the Russian text I’m working on, and find that it can be helpful in choosing the best English words, although not always, of course. The Google translation can actually be quite accurate for several sentences at a time, but sometimes it can also be laughable. It seems to me that the ultimate barrier to perfect automatic translation is the machine’s inability to actually “understand” the meaning of what is said, rather than selecting the most probable correct word from many different possibilities. You wrote before about how automatic translation of your works from Spanish has been a great help to you, and this is certainly true – it can be very helpful, simply never to be left without human review.
Yes, I agree with what you say. When I am translating one of my books from Spanish into English, I start by using the Google Translator and then correct the result. This makes my productivity four times larger. Translating one book used to take me about one month before, and now it takes a week, because it’s much easier to correct an imperfect text than writing it from scratch.
Regards,