The U.S. secretary of state is expected to press a gathering of foreign ministers not to drop aging tactical weapons.

Or if you must drop them, try not to drop them anywhere near us…

From one bear to another…

And in case you think this is an April Fool’s joke:

The words of the song (by Kate Bush) are kind of hard to make out, but it’s about a father waiting for his child to be born. It couldn’t be more appropriate for Big Mike, who went through just that during the AI auditions. Can’t wait to see what he does next week.

But now the  NY Times has come out with an enthusiastic article about how great Google Translate has become. Apparently it uses a completely different algorithm than Babelfish, one based on statistical methods instead of linguistic rules. With their ginormous data base of Web-based texts, Google is uniquely positioned for this brute-force approach. According to the Times, the results are quite good, but “automated translation systems are far from perfect, and even Google’s will not put human translators out of a job anytime soon.”

So I thought I’d see for myself, and do a side-by-side comparison of Google Translate and Babelfish. To make the experiment more objective, I decided not to rely on my own limited foreign-language skills. Instead, I came up with a really grueling test — to start with a piece of text in English, and then go through a daisy chain of other languages, finishing up with English again.

I chose the languages based on what Babelfish could handle, since its list is much shorter than Google’s: English to Dutch, Dutch to French, French to Greek (modern), then back to English. I did feel a little guilty that the test might be unfair, since no computerized translation system could reasonably be expected to retain the integrity of a text through four languages and two alphabets.

The text I chose comes from a recent Associated Press  story that was on the NY Times website:

A California Highway Patrol officer helped slow a runaway Toyota Prius from 94 mph to a safe stop on Monday after the car’s accelerator became stuck on a San Diego County freeway, the CHP said.

Prius driver James Sikes called 911 about 1:30 p.m. after accelerating to pass another vehicle on Interstate 8 near La Posta and finding that he could not control his car, the CHP said.

”I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car and it did something kind of funny… it jumped and it just stuck there,” the 61-year-old driver said at a news conference. ”As it was going, I was trying the brakes…it wasn’t stopping, it wasn’t doing anything and it just kept speeding up,” Sikes said, adding he could smell the brakes burning he was pressing the pedal so hard.

(A digression: Is this the level of writing the AP puts out these days? For one thing, ending two successive paragraphs with “the CHP said” is a bit clumsy. And the run-on sentence at the end sounds like dialog from an Elmore Leonard novel.)

Here’s the result from Babelfish:

A civil servant of patrol of street of his California that is strengthened a refugee Toyota Prius 94 MPU in one certain end Second later car’? ; slow down? s versneller it has stuck in a motorway of province [proanaferthe]‘? [ntos] San Diego, CHP. Has the driver James Sikes van Prius turned the 911 with regard to 1:30 p.m later l’? acceleration it passes qu’? other vehicle in 8 Tusen did the States roughly the drawer post also the discovery [aytos] [to] n’? that [mporeitai] A it checks his car, CHP mentioned before. ‘? ; ‘? ; J’? it has pushed l’? has accelerator it passes a car and has done paradoxically something… polite him jumped and it has stuck only there, ‘? ; ‘? ; the 61 driver of person which c’? east l’? the anniversary has said in a conference of compaction. ‘? ; ‘? ; Datum qu’? it has it goes, j’? it has examined the brakes… wasn’? ; t of this, this wasn’? ; pause? t from n’? import quoi the fact and have kept only accelerative, ‘? ; ‘? ; [Proanaferthe]‘? n Sikes, that it adds has can to feel this the brakes that it has printed whether hard pedal burns.

As I kind of expected, Babelfish has experienced a complete meltdown.  First of all, they make no attempt to retain the paragraph spacing of the original. This may seem like a minor point, but I find it very annoying, since it would have been easy to do.

Secondly, Babelfish is littered with untranslated artifacts from the languages it passed  through along the way: n’importe quoi (= anything at all) from French, versneller (= accelerator) from Dutch, and [proanaferthe] (translation unknown), presumably transliterated from Greek. As I’ve noticed before, Babelfish can’t handle apostrophes in French words, so we get l’?, j’?, and n’? as the best they can do with what are probably very common French words. And apparently somewhere along the line they decided that the driver’s name was James Sykes van Prius.

Now let’s see how Google Translate does:

An officer of the California Highway Patrol helped slow runaway Toyota Prius by 94 miles per hour in a safe halt on Monday after the throttle of the car was stuck in a street in San Diego County, the CHP.

Prius driver James Sikes called 911 about 1:30 pm after the acceleration in a vehicle driven Interstate 8 near La Posta and found that he could not control his car, the CHP.

”I pushed the throttle to pass a car and did something funny … jumping and just sitting there,”61-year-old manager at a press conference. ”It was, I tried the brakes … It was to end, this is nothing to do, and continued to accelerate,”Sykes said, adding that he could feel the burn was pressing the brake pedal so hard.

This is nothing short of astonishing. It’s not perfect, but compared to Babelfish it’s in a different universe. Not only can you easily get the gist of the story, but most of it is written in acceptable idiomatic English (with a few broken connections). The first paragraph is especially impressive.

So is the Times right? Do human translators have nothing to fear from Google? I’m not at all convinced — it might be time for them to start polishing up the old résumé…

And here’s how it sounded afterwards:

Note: this is before I figured out how to do delayed start on my webcam.

Any opinions?

A new album of material recorded by Jimi Hendrix with The Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1969 has just been released — here’s the official video of the title cut.

Some reviewers are saying that the album consists of odds and ends of widely varying quality. No doubt, but this song at least is a stone cold masterpiece. A demo of the song has been around for a while — this version was apparently spliced together from two different takes. No matter — this is classic Hendrix, with its soulful vocals, psychedelic/apocalyptic lyrics, and elegant guitar work.

I like the visuals on the video too — gives me that old Woodstock feeling all over again…