Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way you phrase that is a bit misleading. It's not that Japanese speech has any less info than most languages, it's just that you can set topics (add state to a stack, to put it in geek terms) that carry over into subsequent phrases. The correct translation of an individual sentence may thus depend on that previous context. A simple but famous case is "Watashi wa hamburger desu". The sentence has no subject, so wi…
To clarify further for those unfamiliar with the language,a super literal translation of "watashi wa hanbaga desu" is something like: (concerning/as for) myself, (it's) hamburger. On it's own if Bob says this, basically it comes out as "I (am) (a) hamburger". However, if Sally has just said something like "I'll have a salad...what about you Bob?" then it makes sense as Bob's order is the implied subject and it become…
Re: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice
#121As someone already pointed it out, you should have written the translation as "I - hamburger", not "I hamburger." This implies a pause in speech. I am native Russian speaker and Russian also has this case where the meaning of a sentence has to be deduced from the context of previous sentence. But in written Russian you could look at that sentence only and understand that someone is likely replying to something. I don't practice my Russian daily as my day-to-day communication is only in English. I tend to forget words when i communicate with my Russian friends via email, so i use Google Translator a lot to translate from English to Russian. I actually find that Google is pretty good at translating formal sentence structure you'd see in literature and absolutely abysmal at everything else.