@cemhend@scholar.social @alex @DFKI
One of these translations failures went like this:
English original: “How about meeting tomorrow at 9 pm?”
→
German translation: “Ich kenne eine nette kleine Fischerkneipe.” [“I know a nice little fisherman's tavern.”]
#VerbMobil was an early attempt at automatic live translation in the the domain of appointment scheduling (the project ended in 2000). You can tell that both input and output might have occurred somewhere in the training data (modulo time, date and place specifics), but alignment clearly went wrong.