[neumann_alfred]

"The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each."

So why are they not simply buying the rights of the translations they are using? Because chopping it into pieces and analyzing it automatically doesn't require it? BS, we're talking about big data, if they wanted they could know exactly how many vowels and consonsants they used of each individual translator, and then start haggling.

And "heh" to "all technology and process costs jobs." How many jobs were lost when we found out washing hands before surgery is a good idea? It's such a mindless thing to say. It's a mantra, it's a goal, but far from the truth.

[mniejiki]

>So why are they not simply buying the rights of the translations they are using?

Why do you think they haven't done that? Or rather they paid the entity that owns the rights who at some point in the past paid those translators. Generally speaking the translators gave up their rights in exchange for money long ago.

Specifically google uses, for example, UN documents which translators were paid to translate and which are publicly usable.

If I write some code for a company, get paid for that code and then the company sells that code why should I get paid again?

Or do you think google is the first automated translation service? This has been done successfully for 30+ years commercially and academically. Nothing different just because it's on the web and not on some guys PC.

>How many jobs were lost when we found out washing hands before surgery is a good idea?

Actually, I'm sure there were all sort of quack solutions to infections and whole industries making them which went out of business as a result of doctor's realizing washing hands did the trick.

Edit: Not to mention the loss of jobs for morticians (in the short term), makers of amputation implements (and other tools to deal with all those infections), nurses specializing in dealing with infections, traditional healers (as doctors were now an even better choice) and so on. Lowering infections would have impacted every single person and industry that was built around the previous high-infection status quo.

[mniejiki]

Also, what you seem to not get is that this isn't a zero sum game.

Google translate doesn't cater to the same people as traditional translators. Google translate basically sucks, it can't compete with a half competent translator. It can however compete with a random friend who knows a hundred words in a language, it can compete with spending 6 hours digging through dictionaries, it can compete with asking people on forums for translations and so on. And it has done more than that.

It has increased the market for translations, things that no one would have ever wanted to translate before can now be translated. Things that would have forever been locked away in one language can now be read, barely, by everyone. This is something that human translators without the net could never achieve. The costs and latency were just too high to use them.

That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to belong to the elite and brings it to the masses.

[neumann_alfred]

"That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to belong to the elite and brings it to the masses."

You can't put technology in a nutshell. Also, you just said stuff nobody wanted to translate can now be crappily translated -- am I understand that this was previously an elite privilege? Why is the one-sentence explanation of what all technology is about, always, different in each post? And what does any of this have to do with me correcting the horrible misrepresentation of the article? That, which I consider my main point stands, the rest I happily concedem because I don't care enough, and you do have a point. But what you said would also be true also for a collaborative, public domain effort, so Google and their middleman dreams can gtfo either way as far as I'm concerned.