On 2015/10/24 02:11, Rick McGowan wrote:
> William,
>
> All right... This is likely to be my last posting on the subject...
>
>> ... there has been much objection to my invention in this mailing list
>> over the years, with no good reason ever stated, ...
>>
>> If this invention had been made in the research laboratory of a large
>> information technology company maybe things would be very different.
It's easy to guess that many people have made very similar inventions
before. For example, there are many books that contain simple phrases in
a few languages for tourists. Also, if you had your set of sentences and
their translations, it wouldn't be difficult to create e.g. a smart
phone application for it.
The doctor you mentioned was excited about your idea because she isn't a
language specialist. If she had thought about, or experimented with, the
idea, she would quickly have come to a point where she wants more and
more sentences, for all kinds of slightly different situations. That's
the point where she will start to see that your idea isn't actually that
great.
> Please see attached image, for example. While it's not yet as fun as
> Star Trek, this kind of thing can be done for simple interactions in a
> variety of languages using a $20 cell phone...
>
> See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate
>
> /As of October 2015, Google Translate supports 90 languages at
> various
Well, the translation isn't perfect :-(. It translates
"Have you vomited?" to "あなたは嘔吐していますか？"
Apart from the unnecessary (in Japanese) subject, and the usually not
used question mark, it's present tense, corresponding to "Are you
vomiting?". I'm sure no doctor would have to ask this.
Regards, Martin.
Received on Fri Oct 23 2015 - 16:36:51 CDT
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