Intertran Shakespeare/Should I Buy It?

Factual Questions
1

I already tried posting this thread once, and it seems to have not been posted. If I am simply posting it again now, I am very sorry. (BTW, if you post on these [sometimes] unreliable boards like I do, you may want to save your text. I try to do that every time.)

I honestly couldn’t decide at first if this thread should go in the “General Questions” or the “MPSIMS” section. Since it does contain a question, I finally decided this would be the best forum.

I once saw someone on the message boards refer to InterTran as the great language mangler. I have visited the InterTran site and I think I may know what they are talking about.

The problem exaggerates itself when you translate from English/to another language/and back to English again.

I thought I might showcase some examples of this. I chose Shakespeare for a reason. He puts many subtle innuendos in his speech that a machine like InterTran can’t pick up. The speech would of course be greatly messed up if I chose something like Hungarian to translate it into and then back again. But I’ll make it easy on InterTran. I will use French. Please enjoy:

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.” From “Hamlet.”

Becomes:

To be old , or not to be old : that is the issue : If 'tis grand at the care for at suffer The scarf and arrowheads about disgraceful fortune , Or at catch arm against a sea about trouble , And near the antagonistic end their.

Kind of strange isn’t it? It almost seems like they didn’t finish their sentence.
Let’s try simpler stuff now.

“Friends, Romans, lend me your ears! I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” fr. “Julius Caesar.”

Becomes:

Amigos , Cos lettuce , lend me your ears! I am coming at bury Caesarean , step by step commendation her.

That was almost frightening. I noticed the biggest problem comes when you use words it mistakes for other words. For example:

“Alas, poor Yorrick! I knew him, Horatio.” fr. “Hamlet.”

Becomes:

Alas , flimsy Yorrick! I knew her Schedule.

It can’t seem to differentiate between the proper and non-proper nouns.

Anyways, if there is a question in any of this it is two-fold: This company makes more expensive software called “NeuroTran”. Would this be better? Would it be worth buying, because I like the idea of a language translator. And two are there really any softwares that can translate human language? I heard somewhere once that that was impossible at the present time.

TTFN:D

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I used to work in localization, and the answer is these products are fatally flawed because they cannot understand context. They’re getting better all the time, but (IMO) until they have AI, they’re always going to suck. Their only proper purpose is to allow you to vaguely understand what a piece of foreign text is. To to translate into a foreign language for the benefit of the foreigner, these products are almost useless. Even localization companies will only use native speakers to translate into their language - they wouldn’t even use a non-native speakers with 20 years’ history of fluency.

MPSIMS: I once translated “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink” into Portuguese, then back to English, and it came back as:

“You can lead a horse to the water, but you cannot make it a beverage.”