Considering only transitive nominalizations, that is those that have both an Agent (the one who is doing it, corresponding to the subject in a sentence) and an Object (that to which the action is done, corresponding to the object in a sentence), we find that both of these elements can be marked by a variety of morphological cases.* Thus, the Object can be either genitive, instrumental, or dative, and the Agent can be either genitive or instrumental. noun phrases that describe events rather than “people, place or thing”) is very complex. Had Google Translate been relying on analyzing the grammatical structure, reversing who is doing it to whom might have been more understandable because the morphosyntax of Russian nominalizations (i.e. As you can see from the screenshot on the left, Google Translate rendered obo žanie Putina narodom ‘adoration of Putin by the people’ (an example found in the National Corpus of Russian) as “Putin’s adoration of the people”-so ironic on many levels! (Exact phrase searches in Google bring up two hits for the Russian phrase, but unsurprisingly none for the English phrase that is the Google Translate’s output.) A case in point is an example from the paper I am currently working on, which I threw at Google Translate to see how it would manage. Somewhat more understandable are Google Translate’s errors where the grammatical structure is “translated” as exactly the opposite of what it should be. I cannot imagine a context in which sootvetsvuet dejstvitel’nosti ‘accords with reality’ means (or is translated by a human translator) as “untrue”. Still, it is surprising to find Google Translate’s output that is exactly the opposite of what it should be, considering that Google Translate looks for matches of a given string in a corpus of parallel texts. It is thus ironic that Google Translate’s “translation” of the Russian sootvetsvuet dejstvitel’nosti ‘accords with reality’ is… “untrue” (see screenshot on the left). I have written extensively about problems with Google Translate and its many bloopers in both lexical choices and producing a grammatically cohesive output. Does Google Translate Output Accord with Reality?-And Remarks on the Morphosyntax of Russian Nominalizations
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