3 ms·

Rather than translating the description into an abstract idea, and then translating that idea into a different language; it seems like it's trying to go straigh

• Balgair 9y ago
  To be fair, translating to 'idea-space' is really hard. The medium is the message. We have ideas in English that other languages do not have, and vice versa. Chinese is famous for not having a past tense. Spanish has a subjunctive tense that is difficult for fluent speakers to translate into English. Some languages have cardinal direction based gender tenses. The word 'che' in Italian is a head-tweaker for English speakers. The problem expands as a binomial (handshaking problem). Google translate has 104 languages, which means 5356 cases to deal with (n(n-1)/2) for each 'idea' present. As such, the 'idea' could be translated, but it would result in a mess of a response that no native speaker would translate the 'idea' into. You'd have to teach the basics of the language to the person before real translation could occur. Languages are meant to communicate between two people (writing is subtly, but importantly, different) and context, body language, and recent history play large roles into that communication.