Celebrating Tanabata/Seventh Night In Second Life

In my weekend calendar write-up, I mentioned the celebration of Tanabata, marking a meeting of the stars Vega and Altair on the seventh day of the seventh month in Japan's traditional religious calendar.  Gahum Riptide, who alerted me to the event (and for that matter, the holiday itself), has more details on his blog.  It's happening on Sendai, a Japanese language sim named after the Miyagi city of the same name,

"[T]he festival," notes Riptide, "is something few Westerners will see in their lifetimes in real life unless you plan specifically to be in Sendai at the time."  Yet another reason why I think it's so crucial to include an automated language translation system in the SL viewer.

Comments

[Gahum Riptide]

*cough, cough* it's "Gahum", not "Grahum". Though, a sim owner called me that too the other day :).

Wow, well, I feel a little embarassed because my post was so brief and really didn't discuss much about the festival, but yes, it's one of those festivals you really have to plan on going to really see it happen.

What I didn't mention is that the festival actually goes back to a Chinese festival of Qi Xi, meaning the same thing roughly (Night of Sevens). It's a rather romantic festival since the two stars are considered lovers and only allowed to meet on that one night.

The festival happens all over Japan, but the most well known one is in Sendai.

I have to hand it to the designers of the decorations that you see over in Sendai for their creativeness and flexiprims never had a better use, in my opinon.

I do wish that the signs for the festival had translations done. Although it may just be that they intended the celebration really for the benefit of Japanese SLers rather than everyone in general.

[Laetizia Coronet]

"an automated language translation system in the SL viewer"

None of those even remotely work yet. Somehow computer people seem to think that it's an easy trick to translate. But language, being a human phenomenon, defies all logic and so far, computers can't deal with that.

online translation of that text in Italian:
Nessun dei quei a distanza lavoro uniforme ancora. Gli informatici sembrano in qualche modo ritenere che sia un trucco facile da tradurre. Ma la lingua, essendo un fenomeno umano, sfida a tutta la logica e finora, i calcolatori non possono occuparsi di quello.

and that back to English:
No of those at a distance uniform job still. The informed ones to us they seem in some way to think that it is a trick easy translate. But the language, being a human phenomenon, challenge to all logic and up to now, the computers cannot be taken care of that one.

[eggy lippmann]

The problem with machine translation and AI in general is that people's brains are a lot more about brute force and trial and error than a fancy academic model and algorithm... if you want to have a somewhat decent translator in a computer, put three trillion neurons together and subject them to the same decades of real, human life experience that a professional translator has accumulated. Oh wait we want it "perfect" and we want it "now". Now that sounds like a reasonable demand.