Google Translate’s experiments with machine translation of poetry are yielding some intriguing results.

In a post published last week on the Google Research blog, software engineer Dmitriy Genzel explains how Google is experimenting with poetry and statistical machine translation.

Hold on to your hats: this is where your English lit courses meet up with the frontiers of new technology, and the outcome can strain the mind of even the most literary geeks among you.

The system, which is not yet accessible to the general public,  renders a translation, but can also program in a specific type of meter or rhyme, thus totally transforming a poem – or sacrificing translation accuracy in order to respect form.

One of the examples from the post will give you an idea of the type of word play that is going on here:

« Le Miroir des simples âmes, an Old French poem by Marguerite Porete, translated to Modern French by M. de Corberon, and then to haiku by us:

‘Well, gentle soul’, said
Love, ‘say whatever you please,
for I want to hear.’”

I quite like this machine-generated haiku version of an Old French poem – wait, am I really writing this? Check. It is the year 2010.

But will it play in Peoria? Or, as Google Translate puts it in French –very poorly, I might add, “T-elle jouer dans Peoria?”

Betty Carlson

See Also

• Language Translation, Inc.
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