Vargo wrote:
I find it rather bizarre that Google can beat the best players in the world at go, but can't translate anything (I tried to Google-translate
http://weiqi.qq.com/news/8603.html in English and in French... The result is really strange
Not strange at all. Translating human natural language is a much more difficult problem. Not that hard to get it mostly right, but 90% right comes across to us as terrible.
The problem is that how to properly translate often depends upon the context. Human languages often depend on context to remove ambiguity. Thus:
a) The chickens are ready to eat.
b) The potatoes are ready to eat.
c) The horses are ready to eat.
"a" is ambiguous, "b" is not ambiguous because potatoes don't eat, "c" is ambiguous or not depending on whether in your culture horses are considered edible. In other words, not something that can be determined by word meaning, grammar, and syntax alone.
A good test of a program that purports to translates between human languages is to first translate something for A to B and then translate it back to A. Was the result much like the original. A lot will depend on how closely the two languages are related. We can expect results to be better for English <=> Flemish than for Danish <=> Japanese.