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> GOOGLE: a Program to translate poetry!!!, Don't worry, it'll take them centuries...
Psyche
post Nov 12 10, 00:22
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GUARDIAN.CO.UK. Sam Leith, Sunday, October 24, 2010

Translating poetry might be beyond Google – but we'll have fun watching it try. Google is working on a program to translate poetry, which could, I think, be a fascinating failure

Nothing that is digital is alien to me – as the ancient playwright Terence would have written if he'd only had a quad-core Dell. As final proof that the machines are taking over, Google is working on a program to translate poetry.


The obvious thing to say is that it won't work, and clearly that's basically true. With due humility Google's software engineer Dmitriy Genzel – evidently a software engineer with a hinterland – quotes Robert Frost: "Poetry is what gets lost in translation."

But the more useful thing to think about, it seems to me, is the ways in which it won't work – and, come to that, the ways in which it might. This could, I think, be a fascinating failure.


Leaving aside concrete poetry, trad symbolist stuff, or anything that too radically discards basic grammar – such as The Jabberwocky, which g2 put through Google translate last week – let's concentrate on poetry that, in the late Auberon Waugh's proudly reactionary formulation, "rhymes, scans and makes sense".

That is not to say (though Bron probably would have) that the other kind of poetry isn't worth having. It is only to agree that we let Google walk before it can run. It may get round to the enigmatic poems of Yeats, or the mysterious valences of Gongula in Ezra Pound's Papyrus, but at the moment digital analysis of sound patterns is a smaller problem than dealing with meaning.

For in some ways, making a formal poem has a sort of crossword-puzzle quality. Let's say the job of the poet is to turn an idea into a sentence, or a number of sentences. The poet is then looking at the ways those sentences are joined, grammatically and lexically; how rearrangements and substitutions would affect the sense, and how they would work with and against the scheme of the verse.

Here, I know, I simplify: the process is wrangling and simultaneous rather than sequential and box-ticking. But there's as much craft in the poet's work as in a joiner's. There are multiple, but not infinite, possibilities: which is where Google can help. As its researchers' preliminary paper puts it: "We can treat any poetic form as a constraint on the potential outputs."

What's clever here is that Google is doing this on a statistical, rather than a rule-based, basis – which I understand to mean that, like a flesh-and-blood poet, the machine is trying out lines to see which fit best.

Rhyme is a relatively simple problem. To be caricatural about it, if you are dead set on line two of your terza rima masterpiece ending on the word "hillock", one of lines four and six is sure as hell going to end "pillock". It's the simplest of things to input a rhyming dictionary. If Noel Gallagher can use one, so can Google.

Metre is tougher. But it's not necessarily uncrackable. Its poetic effects – its spring, bounce and wobble – are a whole other shooting match, but the basic tum-ti-tum isn't some higher function of the poetic mind.

Conventional prosody in English is based on an issue that is largely binary: stressed and unstressed syllables. And binary is how Google treats them: "blank verse with iambic foot obeys the regular expression (01) while one with dactylic foot looks like (100)".

There are, of course, degrees of stressed and unstressed – and the stress isn't always intrinsic to the word itself, but dependent on its positioning in the sentence. Still – it isn't impossible to imagine that, to a greater or lesser degree of sophistication, a computer could be taught to write accurate doggerel.

So it can. Google turns a sentence of news – "A police spokesman said three people had been arrested and the material was being examined" – into amphibrachic tetrameter: "An officer stated that three were arrested/ And that the equipment is currently tested."

Where it will fall down, I suppose, is irregularity. Take this couplet from Andrew Marvell's poem

The Garden:

Annihilating all that's made

To a green Thought in a green Shade.



The poem's in iambic tetrameter: di-dum, di-dum, di-dum, di-dum etc. But in the last line, the only way "green thought" and "green shade" can sensibly be spoken is as spondees – that is, two stressed syllables in a row. Spondees are common enough, but it's pretty unusual to find a couple of them bunging up a four-foot iambic line: they call the thing to a standstill, which is what's intended. We can't expect Google to see the point of that line, still less turn it into French – but then, I doubt there's a human translator who could make that work.

Personally, I can't wait for them to share the beta. So far though, according to Mr Genzel, the program is too slow and there again, it's behaving like a poet. Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her auntie Grace to tell her she was dedicating a poem to her. Auntie Grace was long dead by the time the poem, The Moose, was finished.

If Google's poetry program can be taught to drink too much and molest other people's wives, it'll be near as dammit there.


SAM LEITH. Guardian.co.uk.


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Eisa
post Nov 15 10, 18:09
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This is interesting, Syl - fascinating failure! LOL! I like that. We'll have to watch waht happens.

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Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more details, click here!

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Psyche
post Feb 14 11, 22:11
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Hi Eisa! I've tried Google's Translator both on poetry and prose, and the results are ghastly, at least with English and Spanish.

The syntaxis goes all back to front, it's laughable. And yet, and yet, I've had Saxon friends use it on my Spanish blogspot and declare that 'it makes sense'....LOL.... I can't help wondering what they understand. Of course I've used it on my own Spanish poems and it's hilarious!

Now I'm going to post something here that'll get rocks thrown at me...If anybody bothers to scroll down to these nether regions...haha... Speechless.gif

Hugs, Syl*** ghostface.gif


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Mis temas favoritos



The Lord replied, my precious, precious child, I love you and I would never leave you. During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.


"There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction."

Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water, Wuthering Heights.



Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

MM Award Winner
 
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