tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post5847566083722441162..comments2024-03-18T19:05:39.072-07:00Comments on Morphosis: Google Translate's Version of Genesis ch. 1's Hebrew. Adam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-15873722449433647132018-07-19T15:42:34.032-07:002018-07-19T15:42:34.032-07:00I particularly like 1:11 - it seems about to turn ...I particularly like 1:11 - it seems about to turn into a counting rhyme or one of those additive folk songs (the grass and the seed of the grass, the seed and the tree from the seed...).<br /><br />'Firmament' is interesting - it's notoriously a word that everyone knows, but knows only from Genesis 1. Was the Hebrew original also a hapax logomenon?Philhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07009879034507926661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-79714153093920737232018-07-19T04:54:59.146-07:002018-07-19T04:54:59.146-07:00After reading this, I suspect that the Hebrew Bibl...After reading this, I suspect that the Hebrew Bible must be part of the original stuff the algorithim absorbed (or however these self learning language processors work, I am sadly ignorant.) There are too many grammatical anomalies in this passage that it translates smoothly, most glaringly the first word, which is a well known issue. Very, very interesting though.Jesse A.https://www.blogger.com/profile/02915374000225534617noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-29117390584239200852018-07-17T14:07:03.431-07:002018-07-17T14:07:03.431-07:00And actually, reading this again, some of it is ma...And actually, reading this again, some of it is manifestly an improvement. ‘And the land was dull, and darkness and darkness were upon the face of the abyss’, is rather brilliant; ‘And they became a den in the firmament of heaven’ is nicely odd, and I just love: ‘And to every beast of the earth, and to all the birds of the air, and to every rosette on the ground, wherewith a living soul liveth’.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-42289808077943691992018-07-17T13:49:23.633-07:002018-07-17T13:49:23.633-07:00So: I was curious as to what would happen if I too...So: I was curious as to what would happen if I took Biblical Hebrew and put it through Google Translate. So I took the Hebrew from <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(Mechon_Mamre)/Torah/Bereishit/Chapter_1" rel="nofollow">here</a>, ran it through the software, and above is the result. It’s less garbled than I thought it might be, but that makes sense really: Google doesn’t translate foreign text in any substantive way, it scans the internet for existing translations of words, phrases, grammatical constructions and so on, triages the results and posts them. The English comes with the specific instruction to ‘improve’ the translation if you can, which data the Google Translate algorithm will then feed into its own loop. Clearly lots of people have posted online versions of the first few Hebrew verses of <em>Genesis</em>, which means that here the machine comes up with quite a familiar approximation of many of these verses. Some interesting things emerge, nonetheless: the Hebrew for ‘Wednesday’ is evidently just ‘fourth day’, and I quite like the Ashbery-esque slightly-out-of kilter quality and repetitiveness of some of this. ‘1:13 And it was evening, and there was morning morning’ is particularly good.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com