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From: pburke@vms.macc.wisc.edu (Peter Burke, MIC, 263-7744)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc,comp.sources.wanted
Subject: Re: English to German Translator Wanted
Message-ID: <1991Mar23.183231.29535@macc.wisc.edu>
Date: 23 Mar 91 18:20:45 GMT
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Organization: University of Wisconsin Academic Computing Center
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In article <Mar.22.15.48.41.1991.21668@pilot.njin.net>, lodzins@pilot.njin.net (Dean Lodzinski) writes...

>There is such a program out, but unfortunately I forget the name.  I
>have seen the program advertised in PC Computing and in the Selective
>Software catalog.  The list price is $79.  There is also versions that
>do English to Spanish, French and Italian.
> 
>From your message, it sounds as if you doubt it could be done and the
>persons' question was stupid.  I surely hope that isn't the case.
> 

I think the program you saw advertised is the one we recently received 
an evaluation copy off ("German Assistant", but I am not sure of the 
name myself). Well, according to my judgment (I am a native speaker of 
German and did some professional translating a few years ago), it does a 
pathetic job. It is not only poor in terms of the vocabulary it can 
handle, it also can't cope with grammatical complexities that exceed a 
sentece consisting of more than 5 words. The most problematic aspect is 
that it still provides you with a translation, even if it just guessed 
most of the terms. You can edit the questionable ones, but if you don't 
have a clear understanding of the meaning of the entire sentence anyway, 
you will probably never come up with a proper translation. I think this 
program is not safe enough to be relied upon, which raises the question 
who could actually benefit from it? I think it is just one more gimmick 
aimed at people who think learning a foreign language can be done by 
buying a bunch of cassette tapes and a translating program. 
If it is possible at all to create a decent program? Probably, but the 
amount of work and the number of possible definitions (figures of 
speech...) this program would have to be able to figure out (which boils 
down to "understanding" the meaning of an entire sentence/paragraph) is 
so tremendously large, that it hardly could be marketed for $79 at its 
introduction.

Peter