This week
- Bench
- 5 May 2027 Round trip chaining to a fixed point
- Slides
- Open the deck
Every specimen so far was found. This week we make them.
Back-translation is old and mostly used for quality checking, which is not what we are doing with it. Chain a translation out and back enough times and the text stops changing. What it settles into is not a translation of your sentence. It is the system’s preferred output for its own previous output, which makes the fixed point a description of the system rather than of the source.
That is a measurement, taken from outside, of something nobody will let us open.
Outline#
- back-translation, and why it is a bad quality check and a good probe
- convergence: where the fixed point usually sits and why
- reading register, length and vocabulary off a fixed point
- the limits: what a probe from outside can never establish
Teaching team
- Aurel Marchetti — tutor