![]() The fact that your transliteration matched Google Translate's output is not the main reason why it was unpublished. For languages that can be automatically transliterated, machine transliterations are allowed on LT as long as you can verify they're 100% correct (still, don't add transliterations that match the ones LT already provides, that would be pointless). If we unpublished all transliterations that match Google Translate's output we'd unpublish the vast majority of them. The only cases where they aren't are languages whose writing system doesn't convey all necessary information as to how something is pronounced and you have to infer it from context, but even in those cases you could probably make a good machine transliterator. ![]() There is always that risk of falsely accusing someone of posting machine transliteration and potentially that could be devastating for the accused's mental health and cause tremendous harm.Īs both you and I said, machine-made transliterations are indistinguishable from human-made ones for many languages, including Chinese. Given that, perhaps it might be good for LT to allow translators to post machine generated transliteration and flag it as such. You can prove that someone cannot spell or by their mistake or typo, but there is no way of proving that they had cheated by comparing their correct spelling with that found in a dictionary! And as you said, machine transliteration or human transliteration in most situations are indistinguishable. I guess one would be cocksure to have a very solid case before making accusation of someone using machine translator for transliteration even though I cannot imagine what that case would even look like. At no point did it go extinct, it (and even the multitude of its dialects) evolved continuously. The same applies to this so-called Classical Chinese. ![]() All of that is still English and read as modern English. It is not very different from say Chaucer era English and how that became modern English sure it was spoken differently at many different times in between, definitely written differently to the point that more than a few would struggle to understand it today, even more recent Shakespearean English, yet no one would dream of performing one of his plays in silence, or not read the Canterbury Tales aloud. In the case of Chinese, it is critically important that Classical Chinese is about the writing, construction of sentences, choice of characters and in some ways the brevity of it, how it was pronounced in what year (essentially how the same court Chinese language has evolved and became the unifying language even before the so called post-1911 modern era) is mostly irrelevant. In the case of pronunciations "lost to time", not just ancient Chinese but also for example Latin dialects or old spoken Italian, there is still good and purposeful relevance to apply modern pronunciations given that these are often taught formally using them (never come across anything ancient being taught without pronouncing them). I noted that LT exists with the expectation of those learning languages would come here and translators are supposed to bear that in mind.
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