[2014-04-29] Cheap laughs?

[MetaGuest]

You people need at the Facebook page convinced Zach to seriously pull the stick out of your "playing dice with the universe." I was ass and have a laugh at a silly joke made using generalizations. You have all failed your "not an oversensitive douche" rolls.

As how people perceive the hobby geeks over to write this one. We're geeks they found enough people and have a cliché if we can't laugh at it then we need to shut up about making fun of other people, it's okay to look at a D&D player and laugh at it.

I completely agree actually talking to people.

D&D players are clearly happy that the other D&D not critically socially stunted as to actually get a group together.

I wonder what language this was originally written in before it got google translated.

[Peon]

You people need at the Facebook page convinced Zach to seriously pull the stick out of your "playing dice with the universe." I was ass and have a laugh at a silly joke made using generalizations. You have all failed your "not an oversensitive douche" rolls.

As how people perceive the hobby geeks over to write this one. We're geeks they found enough people and have a cliché if we can't laugh at it then we need to shut up about making fun of other people, it's okay to look at a D&D player and laugh at it.

I completely agree actually talking to people.

D&D players are clearly happy that the other D&D not critically socially stunted as to actually get a group together.

That requires that this is inaccurate.



Perhaps it's also playing off the concept of God

Man i thought automated translation was better than this by now

[Edminster]

for nerds y'all are shit at paying attention

[Kaharz]

Did D&D just copy and paste bits of other people's comments together at random, or is there supposed to be some sense to it?

for nerds y'all are shit at paying attention

Well when you don't bother to read what anyone else said... Haven't you ever heard nerds* argue about nerd things?

*Or geeks, I'm not up on which term is socially acceptable, cool or appropriate

[Lupk]

*Or geeks, I'm not up on which term is socially acceptable, cool or appropriate

I think I can help here:

[google]

Man thought this was originally automated

I wonder by written now in i got it translated.

what language was better translation than this before

[gopher65]

Man i thought automated translation was better than this by now

It is.

The issue is that autotranslation software can only translate ideas as well as people can present them. If a person jots down a paragraph that has every word spelt correctly, has every bit of punctuation appropriately used, and is grammatically perfect, autotranslate will do an acceptable job of making their ideas at least understandable in another language. If, on the other hand, a person uses non-standard slang relegated to a small internet subculture or geographic region ("bunnyhug" or "gosux2!"), misspells every second word, misuses heterographic words (to, too, two), and can't punctuate worth a damn, autotranslate will produce gibberish. This will happen even though the paragraph might have originally been understandable to a native speaker of the language.

[DonRetrasado]

Actually I've never had great luck with autotranslation. As an example: aside from the normal hurdles of a task this complicated, it's also true that a phrase that is semantically ambiguous in one language may require an unambiguous translation in another language. Being able to do this requires context clues that even native speakers can mess up sometimes. This is only one problem with autotranslation that we have not solved yet (and one that I cannot even imagine how to solve). Also, note that we do not simply google translate books from one language to another, professional translation tasks are always done by fluent human speakers for a reason. Finally, from personal experience I've tried to autotranslate my own phrases with terrible results, and I don't get a ton of complaints about my intelligibility.

[Peon]

I assume from my high horse of utter ignorance that a big part of what makes automated translation so hard is that native speakers write idiomatically all throughout their work without even realizing it, and that idioms must be a motherfucker to translate a whole suite of meanings in a phrase's convenient packaging. Unless the target language has an equivalent idiom with identical meanings you're pretty much guaranteed to add in some unintended meanings or leave out crucial intended ones.

[DonRetrasado]

Yeah, that is another major problem with machine translation.

Some other issues:
-there is a huge amount of dialectal variation in every language (in fact, no one understands their own language identically to someone else)
-languages that are not related can often have vastly different syntax that is not easily accounted for by syntactic theory
-language continues to evolve and will continue to do so
-computers are hard.

[gopher65]

I assume from my high horse of utter ignorance that a big part of what makes automated translation so hard is that native speakers write idiomatically all throughout their work without even realizing it, and that idioms must be a motherfucker to translate a whole suite of meanings in a phrase's convenient packaging.

"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!"

Yup. I've learnt this the hard way while communicating with just-off-the-boat immigrants. Some of them worked really hard to learn English before arriving, but they (of course) can't understand the constant barrage of cultural references (especially local cultural references) being tossed their way. And vise versa.

Even with those problems though I've had great success with auto-translation. Oh it never comes out perfectly, but as long as the input is clear and as concise as possible the end result is at least comprehensible. 10 years ago (even 5?) that wasn't the case.