6 ms·

Translating the Cyberpunk Future

100 points by wormold 7y ago

toyg 7y ago
Italian here and vouching for the correctness of this. They picked an interesting way to "get out of jail", helped by flexibility in the scenario. Another solution would have been to use the antiquated and formal "lei", which is gender-neutral, replaces the second person with a third, and technically defaults to feminine even when talking to a male (because it's short for "your person", "la sua persona", which is feminine in Italian) - although in practice this is not always the case and the verb can get gendered arbitrarily. "Voi" can also be used in the same way, but then the following verb is always gendered.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  I know it would be unfair to ask you to defend the author's writing simply because you speak their language, but I would be grateful if you (or anybody else who speaks Italian) could explain this part of the article for me: > We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, “x,” and “u.” > Siamo tutt* bellissim* . > Siamo tuttx bellissimx. > Siamo tuttu bellissimu. > I’d seen examples of this on signs before, but it had always seemed to me that asterisks and such were not meant to be a solution, but rather a way to highlight the issue and start a discourse on something that’s deeply ingrained in our language. For our cyberpunk future, we wanted a solution that was more readable and pronounceable, so we thought we might use schwa (ə), the mid central vowel sound. I get why the * and x are unpronounceable, but what's wrong with the u? As an ignoramus on the subject of the Italian language, "tuttu" and "bellissimu" would have been believable to me as Italian words. They look pronounceable to me. Anybody know what I'm missing?
  - riquito 7y ago
    In this example, the ending u sound like you have some mental issue. Anyway, that's an oversimplification of the problem. There hare many words that don't have just the final letter changed, like actor/actress (attore, attrice)
    - toyg 7y ago
      > the ending u sound like you have some mental issue. Or you're from deep Sardinia. "Pattagarru, Ripireddu, Caruddu, Franco..." > actor/actress I believe the "pc" anglosphere has moved to actor being used for women too.
  - tanbog 7y ago
    The "U" would be readable and pronounceable in Italian. Stringing a few "U" ending words together does sound a bit wierd though... like your making a hooting sound or something.
    - frostburg 7y ago
      It would read like a bad parody of someone from Sardinia speaking in Italian with a thick accent.
- tanbog 7y ago
  Also Italian here. The other issue with using "Lei" is everyone would sound like some overly formal grand parent or maybe a government official... it would be like people suddenly breaking into the royal "we" in english.
  - eru 7y ago
    Though funny enough, English has settled on the formal 'you' even when addressing peers.
    - toyg 7y ago
      On this, there is a historical note: the equivalent form exists in Italian ("voi"), but fascist ideologues considered it an "anglophism" and severely forbid it (because of course anything from "perfidious Albion" had to be uprooted)...
- incompatible 7y ago
  Another solution in such a language would be to abandon the feminine forms and use solely the masculine. The justification would be that since we want to treat sexes equally, they should use the same grammar. The masculine forms are chosen because they are already sometimes used as the "default". A version of this in English is to take a traditionally gendered term like Actor/Actress and switch to using Actor for all.
harimau777 7y ago
Something that I'm surprised they didn't mention: They say that most Italian people would pronounce the schwas by just omitting the last vowel altogether which, if I'm understanding correctly, is the vowel that indicates gender. That itself seems like an appropriate way to communicate "not one gender or the other". It also strikes me as a very believable way for language to evolve.
rauchp 7y ago
>We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, “x,” and “u.” If non-binary people in Italy are already using x's or u's for their pronouns, why not just use that?
- agency 7y ago
  FTA: > I’d seen examples of this on signs before, but it had always seemed to me that asterisks and such were not meant to be a solution, but rather a way to highlight the issue and start a discourse on something that’s deeply ingrained in our language. For our cyberpunk future, we wanted a solution that was more readable and pronounceable [...] Not a perfect solution, perhaps, but eminently plausible in a futuristic cyberpunk setting.
- toyg 7y ago
  It's not pronounceable and it's not even a standard. Note how they say "some" activists, it's not a settled matter even in activist circles.
  - tanbog 7y ago
    X isn't pronounceable. U is, though it sounds a bit funky.
- x220 7y ago
  Most gendered languages have 2 or 3 grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter) with gender expressed in nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. Depending on the language it may not be practically possible to add a new gender (or 20 new genders) due to the sheer number of grammatical forms you must memorize just to handle 2 or 3 genders. These are not trivial changes. In English, learning someone's pronoun might mean learning three words. In another language, it might mean learning literally hundreds of new grammatical rules. Instead of asking 99% of people to conform to the linguistic wishes of less than 1% of people, why not just expect them to find a solution within the existing language?
cyberpunk 7y ago
The title had me excited for a second there... guess I’ll have to go back to my diesel powered crystal ball..
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
haecceity 7y ago
This reminds me of a funny story about Chinese writing. Chinese is not a gendered language. A little while ago they decided to split the third person pronoun into masculine and feminine forms because that's what Western cultures do and they thought it'd be progressive. And now we're fighting back against our thousands of years gendered language inheritance.
- a_t48 7y ago
  Which pronoun? “Tā”?
  - haecceity 7y ago
    Ya those two. Same pronunciation different characters.
- theli0nheart 7y ago
  1. By "a little while ago", you mean 100 years ago--during the May Fourth Movement in 1919. 2. This change wasn't made for the sake of becoming more "progressive", it was to accomodate translations of Western literature into Mandarin. More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns
- trianglem 7y ago
  Why exactly are we fighting gendered language? Don’t we want to know if the subject is male or female?
  - vertex-four 7y ago
    Do you also want to encode race, country of origin, height, eye colour, birthdate, into every sentence? Why is gender special enough that it’s worth the problems it causes for many?
    - theli0nheart 7y ago
      Gendered pronouns cut the search space in half which makes them an efficient way to avoid ambiguity. Other traits aren't so clearly split. Gender is distributed roughly 50/50 across the entire population, regardless of nationality, skin color, eye color, etc.
s21n 7y ago
Recently there was a huge backlash in Poland over the translation of the anime series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix [1]. There's a non-binary character named Double Trouble and the translators decided to change its gender to male and named it Kłopotowski (Mr Trouble). All this despite the fact that we do have neutral pronouns in Polish. Unfortunately not everyone agrees on the use of neutral form because it was sometimes used as an insult. There are other options though, for example you can use the plural version (just like they/them in English) or Dukaj's pronoun (introduced in the hard science fiction novel Perfect Imperfection [2] by Jacek Dukaj, “a space opera to end all space operas”) which is similar to the neutral pronoun but replaces the “o” suffix with “u”: it was / ono było / onu byłu. The discussion about the infelicitous translation started on social media [3][4] and eventually was covered by mainstream media. One of the translators gave an interview [5] and said that the reason for the unfortunate decision was organizational chaos and lack of information flow. 1. https://www.netflix.com/title/80179762 https://www.netflix.com/title/80179762 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Imperfection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Imperfection 3. https://www.facebook.com/MistycyzmPopkulturowy/photos/2465431250191889/ https://www.facebook.com/MistycyzmPopkulturowy/photos/246543... 4. https://www.facebook.com/catusgeekus/posts/2450286248592517 https://www.facebook.com/catusgeekus/posts/2450286248592517 5. https://wyborcza.pl/7,75410,25383618,awantura-o-meskie-koncowki-jak-polski-netflix-zrobil-z-klopotow.html https://wyborcza.pl/7,75410,25383618,awantura-o-meskie-konco... (paywall)
- taneq 7y ago
  We've just encountered Double Trouble and they're hilarious. Sorry to hear they got a bit mangled in translation.
sunebeck 7y ago
The typeface they used and can be seen in the screenshot at the end of the article makes the schwa look almost like a regular a.
sdfjkl 7y ago
I grew up in Germany and we suffered a lot from badly translated Games (and worse so in dubbed movies). Almost everyone of my generation ended up just learning English and played the original instead. Most of the time that was all that was available anyways. Except of course for the games translated by Boris Schneider. They arguably were better in German because of his excellent (and hilarious) translations, most notably the Monkey Islands. Apparently his efforts earned him a Wikipedia page: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Schneider-Johne https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Schneider-Johne Much of my early English vocabulary was attained by playing Leisure Suit Larry with a dictionary in my hand.
- eru 7y ago
  I wonder if Germany is still the biggest market for dubs, or whether China has taken over.
- sammorrowdrums 7y ago
  Is it possible you remember some of those German Monkey Island quotes? Do any of them work when translated back into English? I'm intrigued...
  - sdfjkl 7y ago
    Here you go: http://www.int33h.com/test/mi/index.html?lng=de http://www.int33h.com/test/mi/index.html?lng=de
contingencies 7y ago
The body touches on common problems in internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) which should be familiar to programmers who have done properly internationalized software in the past. The canonical implementation is gettext. https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html and https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural... The final quote is a one-sided view of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, a fundamental debate in 20th century linguistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity I must say I was excited at the URL because I thought it was a Quarantine remake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(video_game)

100 points by wormold 7y ago

toyg 7y ago

Italian here and vouching for the correctness of this. They picked an interesting way to "get out of jail", helped by flexibility in the scenario. Another solution would have been to use the antiquated and formal "lei", which is gender-neutral, replaces the second person with a third, and technically defaults to feminine even when talking to a male (because it's short for "your person", "la sua persona", which is feminine in Italian) - although in practice this is not always the case and the verb can get gendered arbitrarily. "Voi" can also be used in the same way, but then the following verb is always gendered.

blotter_paper 7y ago
I know it would be unfair to ask you to defend the author's writing simply because you speak their language, but I would be grateful if you (or anybody else who speaks Italian) could explain this part of the article for me: > We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, “x,” and “u.” > Siamo tutt* bellissim* . > Siamo tuttx bellissimx. > Siamo tuttu bellissimu. > I’d seen examples of this on signs before, but it had always seemed to me that asterisks and such were not meant to be a solution, but rather a way to highlight the issue and start a discourse on something that’s deeply ingrained in our language. For our cyberpunk future, we wanted a solution that was more readable and pronounceable, so we thought we might use schwa (ə), the mid central vowel sound. I get why the * and x are unpronounceable, but what's wrong with the u? As an ignoramus on the subject of the Italian language, "tuttu" and "bellissimu" would have been believable to me as Italian words. They look pronounceable to me. Anybody know what I'm missing?
- riquito 7y ago
  In this example, the ending u sound like you have some mental issue. Anyway, that's an oversimplification of the problem. There hare many words that don't have just the final letter changed, like actor/actress (attore, attrice)
  - toyg 7y ago
    > the ending u sound like you have some mental issue. Or you're from deep Sardinia. "Pattagarru, Ripireddu, Caruddu, Franco..." > actor/actress I believe the "pc" anglosphere has moved to actor being used for women too.
- tanbog 7y ago
  The "U" would be readable and pronounceable in Italian. Stringing a few "U" ending words together does sound a bit wierd though... like your making a hooting sound or something.
  - frostburg 7y ago
    It would read like a bad parody of someone from Sardinia speaking in Italian with a thick accent.
tanbog 7y ago
Also Italian here. The other issue with using "Lei" is everyone would sound like some overly formal grand parent or maybe a government official... it would be like people suddenly breaking into the royal "we" in english.
- eru 7y ago
  Though funny enough, English has settled on the formal 'you' even when addressing peers.
  - toyg 7y ago
    On this, there is a historical note: the equivalent form exists in Italian ("voi"), but fascist ideologues considered it an "anglophism" and severely forbid it (because of course anything from "perfidious Albion" had to be uprooted)...
incompatible 7y ago
Another solution in such a language would be to abandon the feminine forms and use solely the masculine. The justification would be that since we want to treat sexes equally, they should use the same grammar. The masculine forms are chosen because they are already sometimes used as the "default". A version of this in English is to take a traditionally gendered term like Actor/Actress and switch to using Actor for all.

harimau777 7y ago

Something that I'm surprised they didn't mention: They say that most Italian people would pronounce the schwas by just omitting the last vowel altogether which, if I'm understanding correctly, is the vowel that indicates gender. That itself seems like an appropriate way to communicate "not one gender or the other". It also strikes me as a very believable way for language to evolve.

rauchp 7y ago

>We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, “x,” and “u.” If non-binary people in Italy are already using x's or u's for their pronouns, why not just use that?

agency 7y ago
FTA: > I’d seen examples of this on signs before, but it had always seemed to me that asterisks and such were not meant to be a solution, but rather a way to highlight the issue and start a discourse on something that’s deeply ingrained in our language. For our cyberpunk future, we wanted a solution that was more readable and pronounceable [...] Not a perfect solution, perhaps, but eminently plausible in a futuristic cyberpunk setting.
toyg 7y ago
It's not pronounceable and it's not even a standard. Note how they say "some" activists, it's not a settled matter even in activist circles.
- tanbog 7y ago
  X isn't pronounceable. U is, though it sounds a bit funky.
x220 7y ago
Most gendered languages have 2 or 3 grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter) with gender expressed in nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. Depending on the language it may not be practically possible to add a new gender (or 20 new genders) due to the sheer number of grammatical forms you must memorize just to handle 2 or 3 genders. These are not trivial changes. In English, learning someone's pronoun might mean learning three words. In another language, it might mean learning literally hundreds of new grammatical rules. Instead of asking 99% of people to conform to the linguistic wishes of less than 1% of people, why not just expect them to find a solution within the existing language?

cyberpunk 7y ago

The title had me excited for a second there... guess I’ll have to go back to my diesel powered crystal ball..

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

haecceity 7y ago

This reminds me of a funny story about Chinese writing. Chinese is not a gendered language. A little while ago they decided to split the third person pronoun into masculine and feminine forms because that's what Western cultures do and they thought it'd be progressive. And now we're fighting back against our thousands of years gendered language inheritance.

a_t48 7y ago
Which pronoun? “Tā”?
- haecceity 7y ago
  Ya those two. Same pronunciation different characters.
theli0nheart 7y ago
1. By "a little while ago", you mean 100 years ago--during the May Fourth Movement in 1919. 2. This change wasn't made for the sake of becoming more "progressive", it was to accomodate translations of Western literature into Mandarin. More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns
trianglem 7y ago
Why exactly are we fighting gendered language? Don’t we want to know if the subject is male or female?
- vertex-four 7y ago
  Do you also want to encode race, country of origin, height, eye colour, birthdate, into every sentence? Why is gender special enough that it’s worth the problems it causes for many?
  - theli0nheart 7y ago
    Gendered pronouns cut the search space in half which makes them an efficient way to avoid ambiguity. Other traits aren't so clearly split. Gender is distributed roughly 50/50 across the entire population, regardless of nationality, skin color, eye color, etc.

s21n 7y ago

Recently there was a huge backlash in Poland over the translation of the anime series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix [1]. There's a non-binary character named Double Trouble and the translators decided to change its gender to male and named it Kłopotowski (Mr Trouble). All this despite the fact that we do have neutral pronouns in Polish. Unfortunately not everyone agrees on the use of neutral form because it was sometimes used as an insult. There are other options though, for example you can use the plural version (just like they/them in English) or Dukaj's pronoun (introduced in the hard science fiction novel Perfect Imperfection [2] by Jacek Dukaj, “a space opera to end all space operas”) which is similar to the neutral pronoun but replaces the “o” suffix with “u”: it was / ono było / onu byłu. The discussion about the infelicitous translation started on social media [3][4] and eventually was covered by mainstream media. One of the translators gave an interview [5] and said that the reason for the unfortunate decision was organizational chaos and lack of information flow. 1. https://www.netflix.com/title/80179762 https://www.netflix.com/title/80179762 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Imperfection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Imperfection 3. https://www.facebook.com/MistycyzmPopkulturowy/photos/2465431250191889/ https://www.facebook.com/MistycyzmPopkulturowy/photos/246543... 4. https://www.facebook.com/catusgeekus/posts/2450286248592517 https://www.facebook.com/catusgeekus/posts/2450286248592517 5. https://wyborcza.pl/7,75410,25383618,awantura-o-meskie-koncowki-jak-polski-netflix-zrobil-z-klopotow.html https://wyborcza.pl/7,75410,25383618,awantura-o-meskie-konco... (paywall)

taneq 7y ago
We've just encountered Double Trouble and they're hilarious. Sorry to hear they got a bit mangled in translation.

sunebeck 7y ago

The typeface they used and can be seen in the screenshot at the end of the article makes the schwa look almost like a regular a.

sdfjkl 7y ago

I grew up in Germany and we suffered a lot from badly translated Games (and worse so in dubbed movies). Almost everyone of my generation ended up just learning English and played the original instead. Most of the time that was all that was available anyways. Except of course for the games translated by Boris Schneider. They arguably were better in German because of his excellent (and hilarious) translations, most notably the Monkey Islands. Apparently his efforts earned him a Wikipedia page: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Schneider-Johne https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Schneider-Johne Much of my early English vocabulary was attained by playing Leisure Suit Larry with a dictionary in my hand.

eru 7y ago
I wonder if Germany is still the biggest market for dubs, or whether China has taken over.
sammorrowdrums 7y ago
Is it possible you remember some of those German Monkey Island quotes? Do any of them work when translated back into English? I'm intrigued...
- sdfjkl 7y ago
  Here you go: http://www.int33h.com/test/mi/index.html?lng=de http://www.int33h.com/test/mi/index.html?lng=de

contingencies 7y ago

The body touches on common problems in internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) which should be familiar to programmers who have done properly internationalized software in the past. The canonical implementation is gettext. https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html and https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural... The final quote is a one-sided view of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, a fundamental debate in 20th century linguistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity I must say I was excited at the URL because I thought it was a Quarantine remake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(video_game)