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BTW, great example why machine translation still doesn't work for quite different languages. Google Translate outputs the following given the Chinese input: >

BTW, great example why machine translation still doesn't work for quite different languages. Google Translate outputs the following given the Chinese input: > The people of Song Dynasty have good medicines for not tortoises, and they have always used 洴澼絖 as their business. If you hear it, please buy one hundred gold. Gathering together and seeking out the family, said: "My life is a 紴澼絖, but I only count gold; now I have a hundred gold skills, please go with it. "The guest got it, so as to talk about the king of Wu." The more difficult it was, the King Wu made him to fight with the Yueren in winter, defeat the Yueren, and seal the ground. OK‽

markus_zhang 5y ago
Haha I guess it's extremely difficult to translate ancient Chinese into English. TBH there are a few words I don't recognize.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  I'm not sure the issues is that it's ancient. I've just recently learned that Chinese is a very "analytical" language: The meaning of something is apparently to a large degree determined by how words are combined and isn't contained so much in the separate words by themself (at least that's my uninformed understanding of that subject, as I don't speak Chinese). So without actually understanding the context it's likely hard to translate something. But a machine does not understand things. It doesn't have world knowledge so it can't interpret things in context. (An ancient context doesn't make things simpler either of course). You would likely need AGI with a lot of world knowledge to translate such an things. But at that point machine translation for any language would be a solved problem anyway I guess. The other thing is: How do you look up words you don't know having a writing system based on pictures? Without a computer this seems almost impossible to me. That's a big issue with such a writing system imho. I would be keen on trying to learn a little bit Chinese as it's for sure interesting to learn to think in a very analytical language—if the writing system wouldn't be. I have already a hard time with the German orthography, even it's my main language…

markus_zhang 5y ago

Haha I guess it's extremely difficult to translate ancient Chinese into English. TBH there are a few words I don't recognize.

still_grokking 5y ago
I'm not sure the issues is that it's ancient. I've just recently learned that Chinese is a very "analytical" language: The meaning of something is apparently to a large degree determined by how words are combined and isn't contained so much in the separate words by themself (at least that's my uninformed understanding of that subject, as I don't speak Chinese). So without actually understanding the context it's likely hard to translate something. But a machine does not understand things. It doesn't have world knowledge so it can't interpret things in context. (An ancient context doesn't make things simpler either of course). You would likely need AGI with a lot of world knowledge to translate such an things. But at that point machine translation for any language would be a solved problem anyway I guess. The other thing is: How do you look up words you don't know having a writing system based on pictures? Without a computer this seems almost impossible to me. That's a big issue with such a writing system imho. I would be keen on trying to learn a little bit Chinese as it's for sure interesting to learn to think in a very analytical language—if the writing system wouldn't be. I have already a hard time with the German orthography, even it's my main language…