#lingvistika

Example 1:

ENG: She did not ask his opinion, for he had already shown himself to be difficult and ill-tempered when it came to making a choice.

HT (human translator): Na jeho názor se ani neptala, protože už věděla, jak protivný dokázal být, když se musel rozhodovat.

GT (Google Translate): Neptala se ho na názor, protože se už ukázal jako obtížný a špatně naladěný, když došlo na volby.

[She did not ask his opinion, because he has already shown himself to be hard to do and ill-tempered when it came to elections.]

AI (ChatGPT): Neptala se na jeho názor, protože už ukázal, že je těžko rozhodnutelný a náladový, pokud šlo o výběr.

[She did not ask his opinion, because he has already shown himself to be hard to decide and moody in the matter of selection.]

In this one, I think the bots reached a tie in being wrong. Machine translation is notoriously wonky on composite sentences, however ChatGPT genuinely surprised me with somehow managing to "think" a little forward and already connecting "difficult" (těžko) with "making a choice" (rozhodnout se) and laboriously birthing "těžko rozhodnutelný" which would mean "difficult to decide/judge" but in the context of e.g. a competition being tight and it being difficult for the judges to choose the winner. It's not used with sentient beings at all. In my version, I've decided to merge the descriptors "difficult and ill-tempered" into one word "protivný" which is a little more general in meaning, so it encompasses both and drives home the idea of being a neutral way to call out somebody's mean and problem-generating behavior.

Example 2:

ENG: Every time she would have to press a small button and the top of the Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter would pop open automatically, making the interior of the machine accessible.

HT: Pokaždé, když se to stalo, musela zmáčknout čudlík, aby se horní část jejího psacího stroje Royal Quiet Deluxe automaticky odklopila a ona mohla sáhnout dovnitř.

GT: Pokaždé by musela stisknout malé tlačítko a horní část psacího stroje Royal Quiet Deluxe se automaticky otevřela, čímž se zpřístupnil vnitřek stroje.

(no fail here as far as I can tell)

AI: Každýkrát musela stisknout malé tlačítko a víko psacího stroje Royal Quiet Deluxe se automaticky otevřelo, což umožnilo přístup k vnitřku stroje.

[Everyonetimes she had to press a small button and the top of the Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter would pop open automatically, making it possible to access the interior of the machine.]

Now, the word "každýkrát" means "every time," however, in SLOVAK, not in Czech. Two completely different languages. In Czech? "Každý" means "everyone" and "krát" means "time(s)" (as in multiplying something), so "everyonetimes." I'm quite sure that passing the word as Czech counts as an anti-Slovak microaggression XD Google Translate slayed here, no mistakes, I would just word it differently because I've got that Human Touch TM and an insufferable superiority complex.

Example 3:

ENG: There was an 'e' in 'nose' and 'ear.'

HT: Nos i ucho měly 'o.'

This one is rigged against both GT and AI because what they do is gluing the most probable translation equivalents together, and they have no way of knowing that the letter the words "nose" (nos) and "ear" (ucho) share in Czech is "o" and not "e". GT performed as expected.

GT: V 'nosu' a 'uchu' bylo 'e'.

(besides making it sound a little like the letter was physically in someone's nose and ear, it's fine)

But ChatGPT? I wouldn't actually expect it to solve the problem and correctly switch the letters, but given that it is supposed to be much more advanced than GT, I had my hopes high and thought that it would show at least a trace of acknowledgment of the part being somehow difficult. AI: Bylo tam 'e' ve slovech 'nos' a 'ucho'.

[There was an 'e' in the words 'nos' and 'ucho'.] (liar)

Despite those words noticeably lacking in the "e" department, it's worth noting that while GT went out of its way to try to make it sound natural (too natural, in fact), its supposedly smarter cousin fully copied the English sentence structure, which is technically gramatically correct but sounds extremely reverse-Czenglish. (I guess if Czenglish is a Czech-speaking learner's English influenced by Czech, that makes an English-speaking learner's Czech... Ech. It sounds extremely Ech.)

Example 4:

ENG: Did it matter what an imaginary explorer's lips looked like or felt like?

HT: Záleželo vůbec na tom, jak vypadaly rty imaginárního dobrodruha, nebo jaké byly na dotek?

GT: Záleželo na tom, jak vypadaly nebo jak vypadaly rty imaginárního průzkumníka?

[Did it matter what an imaginary explorer's lips looked like or looked like?]

AI: Záleželo na tom, jak vypadají nebo jak se cítí rty imaginárního dobrodruha?

[Did it matter what an imaginary explorer's lips looked like or how they were feeling?]

Do facts care about the your (lips') feelings? As someone who likes to play around with GT quite a lot, I'm very familiar with the "when in doubt, just repeat whatever you've last said" strategy. If you fuck with it long enough, you can make the poor tool repeat one phrase so many times it fills the entire line. However, the mistake ChatGPT made perplexes me. It feels very humanizing. It's a mistake I can easily imagine an actual learner making, failing to distinguish between "to feel like" (comparison) and "to feel" (to experience a feeling). It's a mistake I would totally make several years ago, and fuck it, maybe even now if I'm trying to read fast on a very bad day. Good job at doing a bad job, GPT.

Anyway, these 4 were probably the funniest and most interesting of the whole excerpt. I must admit that analyzing them turned out to be a humbling experience because revisiting my work, I've noticed several mistakes I've made as well that I can't take back, because I've already turned the assignment in. Oh well. However, I did have fun!