57 réponses à ce sujet

[krimesh]

adam_grif wrote...

NO.

I demand TOTAL REALISM. The game must remove all FTL travel, all mass effect technology, and be set on Earth, in modern times. Bullets must kill people in one or two hits and if you die your hard drive self destructs.

[Fiery Phoenix]

LOL

[MonsterFish]

Shepard unites all alien species in the galaxy to fight the reapers. After that reapers hack all translators making Shepard order everyone to obey the reapers.

[Lina]

The thing about natural language translation is that you can't translate a sentence until it has already been completed. Further, some sentences won't make any sense when translated unless understood in the context of sentences that have come before it and the cultural context of the speaker - in a worst case scenario a sentence might have three or more possible translations depending on context.

Even individual words require an understanding of context in order to properly translate, because so many words have multiple meanings, but the foreign language equivalents often assign those meanings to different words.

For example, the english word "lie" has a completely different meaning if you say it as "he was going to lie down on the couch" compared to "she was going to lie to him about her criminal record". Or perhaps they ask "does your town lie in the countryside?" Unfortunately, foreign languages do not have easy, direct 1:1 translations, so they cannot simply translate it into a single foreign word that has the same three possible meanings. For instance, the usage of the word to indicate dishonesty is "mensonge", but the "to be situated somewhere" meaning of the term translates as "se trouver" and finally the positioned horizontally on a surface meaning of the word translates as "être étendu" or "gésir".

Then, when dealing with audio translations instead of text translations, we get an additional problem - homophones! What if they meant "lye" not "lie"? Oh dear! Being able to translate languages to the degree that MEverse or Trekverse or what have you does is basically impossible without a fairly sophisticated A.I., and even then it would not be able to work in real time the way it does in those two series, as per the above context problem.

Oral->aural machine translators would likely have evolved to the point that they are able to recognise homophones through context (I've used Mandarin voice recognition software with a varying degree of success, and there are many more homophones in Mandarin than, say, English), much as text->text machine translators are currently able to parse homographs. Machine translators at present do not work on a word-by-word (morpheme-by-morpheme) basis; there is at least a slight attempt for contextual basis in translation. (I agree, though - real time translation is an issue. Word order alone would make that impossible without prior knowledge of what's to be sad.)

[adam_grif]

The best current translator (developed by google) works by having huge archives of texts that have been translated by humans between languages and using them as reference points. It still produces horrible translations in many cases, but for some phrases (the more common the better) it's much better than conventional translators.

[mjboldy]

MonsterFish wrote...

Shepard unites all alien species in the galaxy to fight the reapers. After that reapers hack all translators making Shepard order everyone to obey the reapers.

That would actually be interesting if the Reaper's scrambled the translators capabilities making the different species unable to communicate effectively with each other. Although that would have a bit more dire circumstances than what I was thinking but I like it.

I'm just glad everyone at least liked the basic idea of Shepard's translator breaking in some form.

[Destroy Raiden_]

I would die of laughter if it died while he was A: talking to the console or B: with his LI. Also I’d love it if the translator broke during a prothean mission due to all the haywire interference the beacon was putting out so when Shep starts finding an AI he can only understand that and not his alien crewmates. Also think about it you go to a strange world you pick good fighters most of those are aliens you need tech experts incase anything technical wise goes wrong those are aliens too so the player would be stuck with at least one crewmen who can’t speak jack to them without having to draw them a picture first. I think along with the discovery dialogue (where all characters are shocked and speaking in their original languages) you also can press A like in ME to talk to them and still hear the gibberish if you want only after the beacon blows up (from shep using it of course) then everyone’s translators are back to working order and the Normandy can be contacted.

[Destroy Raiden_]

adam_grif wrote...

How does the translator manage to lipsynch the aliens being translated in REAL TIME, and provide them all with unique earth-accents?  I mean like, how can it translate parts of words before the full word has even happened?

Effin' translators, how do they work.

It's a movie gimmick or should I say game gimmick? Anyhow if the whole game ended up being a bad asian dub then half the audience would be laughing their heads off and the other half would find it impossable to take it seriously, turn it off, and call the game a rushed game that wasn't worth the money. For the sake of people taking it seriously and for maintaining audience attention they all lip-synch to their script perfectly. So if the translator breaks you'll find all the aliens will lip synch in time with however they speak in their normal language then once the game returns to English they're spot on English yet again.