6 ms·

Can We Translate English To English?

23 points by robinhouston 16y ago

trotsky 16y ago
The idea was that perhaps they could help improve the quality of this or any other written piece. I'd pay $10 without thinking twice for a chrome extension that simply ensured the correct versions of there, their and they're were replaced based on context when they were misused. Hmm, I wonder how hard that would be.
mcantor 16y ago
Obligatory: http://www.translationparty.com/ http://www.translationparty.com/
mcantor 16y ago
The linguist in me recoiled in disgust at this idea, instantly envisioning a nightmare universe where laconic tweens fingered anti-prose into their touch-screen phones ("lol i tnk ur rong cuz he wuz @ skool ystrday"), to be Googled into corresponding legible words ("I think you have the wrong idea; I saw him at school yesterday.") as their actual ability to communicate slowly atrophied. The developer in me thought, "Oh man. That would be effing sweet."
- scott_s 16y ago
  Why is that idea disgusting? When people know what they say will get translated, they tend to think in terms of the end result. This would promote the use of proper English, because that's how it would be read and written. When I code in a programming language, I am constantly thinking about what the language constructs mean, not what they literally say. The disjointed net-speak would just become a form of shorthand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand).
  - mcantor 16y ago
    Perhaps it depends on the person? My "disgust," or worry, in my original post, came from the vision of someone internally or unconsciously deciding, "The computer will make my communication effective for me, so I needn't bother learning to communicate effectively myself." Without an empirical understanding of how to communicate, a person would also lack the trappings of that learning process, and, I think, would be forever marred as a result. When you code, mustn't you be aware of what the code constructs literally say, because that is how the compiler will interpret then?
    - scott_s 16y ago
      When I say literally, I mean that a for loop is constructed of the English word "for." I don't think of it like that. I think, "Okay, I need to iterate over the elements of this sequence, so I'll use a for loop." The code is literally just text, but I must understand their semantics to know what will happen. Similarly, if someone was using what you proposed, they would have to keep in mind that the other person would see the proper English, not the net-speak. So they would - I think - end up thinking in proper English first, then coding the proper English using net-speak. They must think in terms of the end result, in terms of what the person they're communicating with will read. For that reason, I disagree with your assessment that people would be able to think "I don't need to bother learning to communicate effectively."
      - mcantor 16y ago
        Ah, I see. You're saying that the shorthand exists only for brevity of input; when a tween types "lol ur rite," they first think of what they mean ("That's funny! You're right!"), and only then do they translate it into the corresponding shorthand so they can type it faster. That's a very good point. I'll have to ruminate on that for a while. Edit: It's worth noting that something about it still feels horribly wrong to me, but I can't seem to find the right words to express it. So I will concede... for now! :-)
        scott_s 16y ago
        Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Perhaps your reservation comes from the fact that now there is no translations, so you associate net-speak with what it is now: stilted communication optimized for brevity of input time and length.
  - aplusbi 16y ago
    I think it would be similar to the phenomenon of Chinese people forgetting how to write characters that they can read and type. Perhaps not disgusting, but something is lost in the process.
dinedal 16y ago
If there was a program to go from legalese to lay that was as accurate as a lawyer then it would change the lawyer's profession forever.
klbarry 16y ago
I think it's possible, but you would need peices to draw off of: Google uses U.N. translations to train their algorithms, but how many documents do we have translating legalese into good english, or poor writing into great writing? Probably not more than a couple hundred.
- danohuiginn 16y ago
  We have documents that have gone through an editing process, with changes tracked from draft through to published article. I'm thinking particularly here of the process inside, say, a news agency. Many of the changes made by sub-editors are fairly mechanical modifications, to conform to a standard style. They might well be sufficiently repetitive to train a 'translator'. You could also take a corpus of 'good' and a corpus of 'bad' writing, and compare the features in each. sentence length, constructions used. Origin of words would be an interesting one ('never use a Latinate word where an Anglo-Saxon one will do'). Unfortunately, most of the difference between good and bad writing is in the ordering of ideas; you can't really deal with that on statistical grounds.
mcantor 16y ago
Honestly, the more I think about this, the more I think that we'll have an English-to-English translating algorithm as soon as we have a "classical-masterpiece"-writing algorithm or a "painting-so-beautiful-it-makes-you-cry"-creating algorithm; that is, probably never. I'm no expert writer, but I know a few, and it seems to me that excellent writing style is more than reading Strunk & White cover-to-cover while reciting mnemonics for choosing between "who" and "whom." It's also knowing when to break or bend the rules, how to break or bend the rules, and why to break or bend the rules. That's the kind of spontaneous creativity that I don't think computers are even close to emulating, much less learning.
- hxa7241 16y ago
  As Wittgenstein said, "language is a form of life" -- it is not just a system of encoding. But something like Photoshop filters for text style might be possible. You can imagine the cheesy use of, say, gothic-romanticising, like overdone HDR tone mapping. But there are useful image manipulations too, when well deployed, and there must be similar potential for text, maybe more so given its more structured form . . .
- kaens 16y ago
  Have you read http://www.unc.edu/~mumukshu/gandhi/gandhi/hofstadter.htm http://www.unc.edu/~mumukshu/gandhi/gandhi/hofstadter.htm ?
buymorechuck 16y ago
I've often thought the same, and set out to build song writing software with ML principles. I ended up with iRhyme, an iPhone app that analyzed a huge corpus of existing song lyrics to make a good song writing oriented rhyming dictionary. That worked out well but improving general prose seems difficult. I think domain specific applications could be good stepping stones.
Prisen 16y ago
Isn't this idea very similar to the grammar suggestions you can get from Word? The quality of those suggests it is a very hard problem.
lionhearted 16y ago
Some classic works are very difficult to read in their native language. I've had Japanese friends say that Genji Motoganari - probably the most famous Japanese literature of all time - is basically unreadable in Japanese, and they didn't "get it" until they read it in English. I feel the same about some older English works. For a long time, I've thought it'd be cool to have one talented author translate an older English book into modern Japanese, and a second author who hadn't read the original to translate it back to English. I bet it'd be more readable.
- xiaoma 16y ago
  I read part of Genji Monogatari during my Japanese studies as an undergrad. It's nearly 1,000 years old and it's absolutely not the same language that's spoken in modern Japan. How much of anything written that long ago could a normal native English speaker understand? It's just not a reasonable thing to expect from the general populace.
cabalamat 16y ago
One thing some people do is take an article on the net, use Google translate to translate it into some other language and then back to English, and put it as an article on their website to attract money from Google ads. This counts as better, for a suitably restricted definition of "better" -- it makes approximate sense and is different enough from the original that Google doesn't spot it.
drats 16y ago
"This is one of the best written and slickest proposals I have ever read. Do NOT fund this work under any circumstances."- NSF grant reviewer That's eminently quotable. edit: "rant reviewer" => "grant reviewer" edit2: proposal => proposals (even though it's proposal in the link, putting proposal[sic] just looks odd).
nodata 16y ago
A company called White Smoke has an application that will take non-native English and fix it: http://www.whitesmoke.com/products.html http://www.whitesmoke.com/products.html

23 points by robinhouston 16y ago

The idea was that perhaps they could help improve the quality of this or any other written piece. I'd pay $10 without thinking twice for a chrome extension that simply ensured the correct versions of there, their and they're were replaced based on context when they were misused. Hmm, I wonder how hard that would be.

mcantor 16y ago

Obligatory: http://www.translationparty.com/ http://www.translationparty.com/

mcantor 16y ago

The linguist in me recoiled in disgust at this idea, instantly envisioning a nightmare universe where laconic tweens fingered anti-prose into their touch-screen phones ("lol i tnk ur rong cuz he wuz @ skool ystrday"), to be Googled into corresponding legible words ("I think you have the wrong idea; I saw him at school yesterday.") as their actual ability to communicate slowly atrophied. The developer in me thought, "Oh man. That would be effing sweet."

scott_s 16y ago
Why is that idea disgusting? When people know what they say will get translated, they tend to think in terms of the end result. This would promote the use of proper English, because that's how it would be read and written. When I code in a programming language, I am constantly thinking about what the language constructs mean, not what they literally say. The disjointed net-speak would just become a form of shorthand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand).
- mcantor 16y ago
  Perhaps it depends on the person? My "disgust," or worry, in my original post, came from the vision of someone internally or unconsciously deciding, "The computer will make my communication effective for me, so I needn't bother learning to communicate effectively myself." Without an empirical understanding of how to communicate, a person would also lack the trappings of that learning process, and, I think, would be forever marred as a result. When you code, mustn't you be aware of what the code constructs literally say, because that is how the compiler will interpret then?
  - scott_s 16y ago
    When I say literally, I mean that a for loop is constructed of the English word "for." I don't think of it like that. I think, "Okay, I need to iterate over the elements of this sequence, so I'll use a for loop." The code is literally just text, but I must understand their semantics to know what will happen. Similarly, if someone was using what you proposed, they would have to keep in mind that the other person would see the proper English, not the net-speak. So they would - I think - end up thinking in proper English first, then coding the proper English using net-speak. They must think in terms of the end result, in terms of what the person they're communicating with will read. For that reason, I disagree with your assessment that people would be able to think "I don't need to bother learning to communicate effectively."
    - mcantor 16y ago
      Ah, I see. You're saying that the shorthand exists only for brevity of input; when a tween types "lol ur rite," they first think of what they mean ("That's funny! You're right!"), and only then do they translate it into the corresponding shorthand so they can type it faster. That's a very good point. I'll have to ruminate on that for a while. Edit: It's worth noting that something about it still feels horribly wrong to me, but I can't seem to find the right words to express it. So I will concede... for now! :-)
      - scott_s 16y ago
        Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Perhaps your reservation comes from the fact that now there is no translations, so you associate net-speak with what it is now: stilted communication optimized for brevity of input time and length.
- aplusbi 16y ago
  I think it would be similar to the phenomenon of Chinese people forgetting how to write characters that they can read and type. Perhaps not disgusting, but something is lost in the process.

dinedal 16y ago

If there was a program to go from legalese to lay that was as accurate as a lawyer then it would change the lawyer's profession forever.

klbarry 16y ago

I think it's possible, but you would need peices to draw off of: Google uses U.N. translations to train their algorithms, but how many documents do we have translating legalese into good english, or poor writing into great writing? Probably not more than a couple hundred.

danohuiginn 16y ago
We have documents that have gone through an editing process, with changes tracked from draft through to published article. I'm thinking particularly here of the process inside, say, a news agency. Many of the changes made by sub-editors are fairly mechanical modifications, to conform to a standard style. They might well be sufficiently repetitive to train a 'translator'. You could also take a corpus of 'good' and a corpus of 'bad' writing, and compare the features in each. sentence length, constructions used. Origin of words would be an interesting one ('never use a Latinate word where an Anglo-Saxon one will do'). Unfortunately, most of the difference between good and bad writing is in the ordering of ideas; you can't really deal with that on statistical grounds.

mcantor 16y ago

Honestly, the more I think about this, the more I think that we'll have an English-to-English translating algorithm as soon as we have a "classical-masterpiece"-writing algorithm or a "painting-so-beautiful-it-makes-you-cry"-creating algorithm; that is, probably never. I'm no expert writer, but I know a few, and it seems to me that excellent writing style is more than reading Strunk & White cover-to-cover while reciting mnemonics for choosing between "who" and "whom." It's also knowing when to break or bend the rules, how to break or bend the rules, and why to break or bend the rules. That's the kind of spontaneous creativity that I don't think computers are even close to emulating, much less learning.

hxa7241 16y ago
As Wittgenstein said, "language is a form of life" -- it is not just a system of encoding. But something like Photoshop filters for text style might be possible. You can imagine the cheesy use of, say, gothic-romanticising, like overdone HDR tone mapping. But there are useful image manipulations too, when well deployed, and there must be similar potential for text, maybe more so given its more structured form . . .
kaens 16y ago
Have you read http://www.unc.edu/~mumukshu/gandhi/gandhi/hofstadter.htm http://www.unc.edu/~mumukshu/gandhi/gandhi/hofstadter.htm ?

buymorechuck 16y ago

I've often thought the same, and set out to build song writing software with ML principles. I ended up with iRhyme, an iPhone app that analyzed a huge corpus of existing song lyrics to make a good song writing oriented rhyming dictionary. That worked out well but improving general prose seems difficult. I think domain specific applications could be good stepping stones.

Prisen 16y ago

Isn't this idea very similar to the grammar suggestions you can get from Word? The quality of those suggests it is a very hard problem.

lionhearted 16y ago

Some classic works are very difficult to read in their native language. I've had Japanese friends say that Genji Motoganari - probably the most famous Japanese literature of all time - is basically unreadable in Japanese, and they didn't "get it" until they read it in English. I feel the same about some older English works. For a long time, I've thought it'd be cool to have one talented author translate an older English book into modern Japanese, and a second author who hadn't read the original to translate it back to English. I bet it'd be more readable.

xiaoma 16y ago
I read part of Genji Monogatari during my Japanese studies as an undergrad. It's nearly 1,000 years old and it's absolutely not the same language that's spoken in modern Japan. How much of anything written that long ago could a normal native English speaker understand? It's just not a reasonable thing to expect from the general populace.

cabalamat 16y ago

One thing some people do is take an article on the net, use Google translate to translate it into some other language and then back to English, and put it as an article on their website to attract money from Google ads. This counts as better, for a suitably restricted definition of "better" -- it makes approximate sense and is different enough from the original that Google doesn't spot it.

drats 16y ago

"This is one of the best written and slickest proposals I have ever read. Do NOT fund this work under any circumstances."- NSF grant reviewer That's eminently quotable. edit: "rant reviewer" => "grant reviewer" edit2: proposal => proposals (even though it's proposal in the link, putting proposal[sic] just looks odd).

nodata 16y ago

A company called White Smoke has an application that will take non-native English and fix it: http://www.whitesmoke.com/products.html http://www.whitesmoke.com/products.html