The writing in my live blogging from conferences is usually pretty plain language since it’s mostly stream of consciousness (and my consciousness isn’t all that flowery). Other writing that I do for clients sometimes isn’t as plain, and I take your point that maybe it should be; in fact, I made the point in an earlier post today that someone’s website was somewhat incomprehensible because of the overly fanciful language that they used.

As a lark to reinforce the translation argument, I cut and paste your “total crap” Google Translator paragraph into Google Translator - starting from English to French, and then back. An ideal machine translator of course would render perfect results.

You get this:

“Another option is machine translation, but because you will know if you ever employed the translation of Google, quality can be total shit with solutions of low-end. There are the professional systems of high quality (and more expensive), but those requires the wide formation and always requires the examination of the output.”

Surprisingly good, although the devil is in the details. The phrase “quality can be total shit with solutions of low-end” is the kicker. Professional translators can parse through idiosyncracies and slang and render such phrases properly, which is why Ryan noted, they’re worth the big bucks, even if only for phrases such as this.

Translation requires both syntactic and cultural fluency. As a result, machine translation is as fluent as a kid with a large dictionary and only the faintest of clues of what they’re doing with it. You can try to make heads or tails of what pops out, but since it’s not based in contextual understanding of language, the essential flavour of the original is twice-removed from the source, and thus the results are hackneyed or worse.

A perfect example - the paragraph above - deliberately colloquial in terminology to make a point - translates Eng/Fr and back to this:

”
The translation requires the syntactic and cultural control. Consequently, machine translation is as flowing as a child with the large dictionary and only weakest of the indices of what they do with him. You can try to make heads or tails of what noises outside, but since it is not based in the contextual arrangement of the language, the essential savour of the original two time-is removed source, and the results are thus folded back or worse.”

Understandable, kind of, but a real effort.

What is interesting (and notable about your blog postings, actually) is that straightforward language can easily be parsed to reasonable degrees of accuracy, whereas flowery nonsense (more my style, alas) is mangled beyond belief.

Too often, people privilege the flowery as intellectual, and to bad effect, IMO. It’s harder to understand, even without machine translation. It’s too high-context, high-touch - great poetry if done right, perhaps, but as a means of delivering a simple point, very inefficient.

So, it’s nice to see a very appropriate and factual account of today’s happenings. It’s like I was there. And I was, but your liveblogging’s actually beneficial in supplementing my already extant understanding, which makes it particularly valuable. Thanks!