There is so much wrong with the machine-translation bits, haha. Because quite apart from "uncovering the plaintext of a systematically-encoded enemy transmission != fuzzy natural language translation, an Enigma machine wouldn't be capable of the latter, and you'd need to know Norse to program it anyway"... it's Norse. They're not exactly running statistical analysis to crack some baffling linguistic isolate here--just pop over to any respectable university library and check out their copy of E.V. Gordon, for Christ's sake. Or write a colleague in Iceland, since Norse and Modern Icelandic are mutually comprehensible.
It just gives me inordinate amounts of rage, since I suspect that subplot could only have been written by someone with an interest in both computer science and Old Norse, and yet a passing familiarity with either subject immediately raises half a dozen reasons the machine translation bits are incredibly dumb.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-12-03 04:14 pm (UTC)It just gives me inordinate amounts of rage, since I suspect that subplot could only have been written by someone with an interest in both computer science and Old Norse, and yet a passing familiarity with either subject immediately raises half a dozen reasons the machine translation bits are incredibly dumb.