alt Hacker NewsGetting byte exact text isn't the point though: even if it's different, I as the original writer can still look at roundtripped text and evaluate that it has the same meaning.
It's not a lossy process, and N round-trips should not lose any net meaning either.
This isn't a possible test with many other applications.
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charcircuit • last Wednesday at 9:55 AM
How about a different edge case. It's easier to round trip successfully if your translation uses loan words. It can guarantee that it translates back to the same word. This metric would prefer using loan words even if they are not common in practice and would be awkward to use.
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English to Japanese loses plurals, Japanese to English loses most honoriffics and might need to invent a subject (adding information that shouldn't be there and might be wrong). Different languages also just plain have more words than others with their own nuances, and a round trip translation wouldn't be able to tell which word to choose for the original without a additional context.
Translation is lossy. Good translation minimizes it without sounding awkward, but that doesn't mean some detail wasn't lost.