Dogs Bastard

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Google has unveiled some new features for its Translate feature, including some for Hindi. Considering that they’ve introduced some amazing functionality over the last few months, including the Translator Toolkit, I decided to see how much their machine translation has improved.

Two of the new features include a) typing non-Roman-script languages in Roman script, which is then automatically transliterated into the correct script and b) translate-as-you-type.

So in went Dharmender Paaji’s trademark line. With translate-as-you-type, I got the following result –

Quite accurate, considering that it’s not easy for a machine to distinguish that कुत्ते /kʊt̪ːeː/ is not just the plural of कुत्ता /kʊt̪ːaː/ ‘dog’, but also the vocative case for this word.

I continued typing, and translate-as-you-type slowly came into its own –

While probably an appropriate representation of how Dharmender Paaji himself would have translated his famous dialogue into English – he once called Bobby Deol ‘a piece of his heart’ (cf. जिगर का टुकड़ा /ʥiɡər kaː ʈʊkɽaː/) – what intrigued me was why the same word was translated ‘fucking’, then ‘motherfucker’, and eventually ‘bastard’.

Maybe it was Google Translate getting rid of some deep-rooted frustration. I felt sorry for it and made its task easier by improving the punctuation –

Comma after कुत्ते /kʊt̪ːeː/ gave improved results. But it was still lacking the required effect. In went the exclamation marks –

Why the exclamation marks cause ‘dog’ to become ‘dogs’, and ‘you bastard’ to ‘bastard’, I’m not too sure.

Playing around a little more, I got rid of an exclamation mark, which gave me –

I still haven’t been able to understand when कमीना /kəmiːnaː/ means ‘fucking’, and when ‘bastard’.

PS: For those who can’t read Hindi, here’s that immortal dialogue in the IPA -

kʊt̪ːeː ! kəmiːneː ! mɛ̃ː t̪eːraː xuːn piː ʥaːũːɡaː !

roughly meaning -

‘Dog! Wretch! I’m going to drink your blood!’

Updated: 2009-11-28