Google Translating Magic: the Gathering cards, According to Gatherer

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4 Responses

  1. alextfish says:

    Wow, that was delightfully bonkers.
    It looks like you might be going through slightly more languages than Rosewatta Stone does. At least, the text you end up with here seems to be significantly more divergent from the original rules text than theirs is.

    It also looks like one of the languages kept inserting random email/computer/e-commerce terminology where it really wasn’t required. There’s a bit of a running theme of that, enough that I’d be mildly curious to try to work out which language that was. But, y’know, not actually curious enough to go and look at the lists of relevant languages to see if there was a common factor.

    Fun stuff! 🙂

    • jmgariepy says:

      Didn’t take me too long to check, since the email/computer/e-commerce terminology was most pronounced on three cards. So I opened those up and compared languages. Interestingly, there’s no commerce ‘lingua franca’ between the three of them. In fact, Daretti and Crocunura only share one language, Afrikaans, which wasn’t used in Dance of the Skywise. Weird.

      • alextfish says:

        Huh. That is indeed strange. Maybe Google Translate’s training data skews in that direction for a whole bunch of languages.

        • jmgariepy says:

          Mm. It’s possible that the AI is just learning the things we’re most likely translating for when making obscure language crossovers. If you knew Tagalog, to pull a language out of a hat, and needed to translate to Swedish most randomly, the most likely reason would probably be something to do with finance, banks, and business transactions. It would be incredibly rare for a person from the Philippines to need to talk to someone from Sweden for any other reason.

          But maybe that’s my Ameri-centric bias showing.

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