3 ms·
I've been learning Japanese as of late, and automated translation tools are near useless for anything but sentences that are just a few words stringed together
by GuiA 11y ago
I've been learning Japanese as of late, and automated translation tools are near useless for anything but sentences that are just a few words stringed together (and even then, nonsense is often returned as soon as a tiny bit of slang or metaphorical language is used). I also have friends who speak languages that are not part of the top 10 most spoken in the world (eg Finnish, Hungarian, etc) and trying to translate their Facebook statuses returns complete garbage.
Between languages that are fairly close to one another (such as French and Spanish), sure - you can pipe text from one language to another in Google Translate and the results will be mostly understandable (although still very awkward). But anything else, and automated translation still has ways to go. Turns of phrases, idioms, general syntax etc. are fairly similar between languages that are closely related, so automated translation has an easy job there (with the caveat that it starts falling apart as soon as slang or more colloquial expressions are used). But step any further than that, and it's a lost cause.
The article also assumes that there's a 1:1 mapping between everything you can express in every language, and that it's just a matter of software finding the right mapping for whatever you're saying into the destination language. But any translator will tell you that this couldn't be further from the truth - there are many things I can say in English to my Californian friends that don't really work in a French conversation with my Parisian friends (let alone in Mandarin or Japanese). At best you'll be met with blank stares, and at worst you'll be breaking etiquette in major ways. Part of learning a new language is learning the space of what can be expressed and how in that language.
For these reasons, I don't really buy the whole "earpiece that automagically lets you speak with anyone in the world" anytime in the next few decades. Which is fine, because learning languages is fun :)
On the other hand, I'm currently in the Netherlands for a conference, and everyone speaks flawless English. I've had a similar experience in Germany, Sweden, and a bunch of other countries (but not in my country of origin, France, where being terrible at English seems to be a point of pride). So maybe taking a page from their book when it comes to education is a better idea than waiting for technology to let us be lazy.
- timr 11y agoExactly. I've been taking Japanese recently, too, and the grammatical structure of the language alone is enough to show that the "real-time whispering earpiece" as an impossible concept: in English, the verb usually comes near the beginning of a sentence. In Japanese, it's near (or at) the end. Translating one language to the other therefore requires a mental "tape delay", while you map the one grammar onto the other. Even when you hear bilingual, fluent translators converting Japanese to English, there's often a weird disassociation between the words the speaker is using and the words coming out of the translator. The translator is buffering the words and translating in logical units. Even if you grant the benefit of the doubt and call this "real time" translation, I know of know translation system that is capable of any sort of similar kind of judgment with an unbounded input stream. Deciding where to begin/end translation requires knowing what the original sentence intended to express. And computers still suck at that.
- rmc 11y agoGerman, one of English's closest languages, also does the "verb at end" for many constructs (e.g. past tense, future tense, "must"/"should"/"can")