Thursday, October 21, 2010

Does the computer always give the right answer?


I thank Eric Bittner for sending me this in response to the last post. He says:

this on a road sign in Wales. The part in Welsh reads "we are out off the office at the moment, we'll translate this when we return". (or something like this). What had happened was that some one had sent a phrase to an automatic translation service, got an out of office reply, and not knowing Welsh, figured it was the correctly translated phrase. The point is that you can't blindly trust a computer or translation software to get things right.

2 comments:

Reflections of the 2026 Nobel Prizes

 Last week I enjoyed following the Nobel Prize announcements in Physiology or Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry. Reading the popular accounts...