Sunday, September 10, 2023

Machine Translation Examples

 Inspired by the recent movie "Oppenheimer", I tried translating the famous quote "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds". I compared three different machine translation tools:

Reverso: 今、私は世界の破壊者である死になっています。

Google Translate: 今、私は世界の破壊者、死となった。

ChatGPT: 今、私は死神となり、世界の破壊者となった。

I think it is interesting how the different translation tools interpret the tense here. This is a tricky quote because it's already oddly phrased in English - we wouldn't usually say "I am become (noun)". If I tried to translate those sentences from Japanese into English, I would get something more like Now, I am the destruction of the world, I became/am becoming death. Since it's such a famous quote, I'm sure it has been translated into Japanese by a human translator , and I'd be curious to learn how it is usually done!

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