14 ms·
These translation issues will be familiar to anybody learning a current, very much alive language, especially if you're reading informal forums (say, Youtube co
by simias 5y ago
These translation issues will be familiar to anybody learning a current, very much alive language, especially if you're reading informal forums (say, Youtube comments). You have the same types of abbreviations, more-or-less voluntary misspellings and jokes or references that only make sense from a certain cultural standpoint.
I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.
For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.
- monkeybutton 5y agoThis is one of the arguments against machine translation: one would first need to construct an AGI capable of observing and understanding the living cultural context that language is being used in. Without that, researchers are endlessly having to update the training corpus for the ML system to learn by example.
- Victerius 5y agoThe day a machine can make a meme is the day we reach the singularity.
- Ancapistani 5y agoWelcome, to the World of Tomorrow! https://imgflip.com/ai-meme https://imgflip.com/ai-meme
- slowmovintarget 5y agoIt sort of works... https://imgflip.com/i/69gjkt https://imgflip.com/i/69gjkt
- mabub24 5y ago"If a lion could speak, we could not understand (verstehen)[0] him." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations [0] Ironically, there is disagreement over the best translation of verstehen. Understand and comprehend have some conceptual overlap, but also some distinctions. The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.
- pavlov 5y agoWe could just agree that "to forestand" is a new word that means the same as German "verstehen", and maybe eventually it actually would.
- Koshkin 5y agoI do not believe this would make sense. The German 'ver-' has nothing in common with the English 'fore-'.
- mwattsun 5y agoHow would one even attempt to communicate with an octopus? Alien intelligence: the extraordinary minds of octopuses and other cephalopods https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/alien-intelligence-the-extraordinary-minds-of-octopuses-and-other-cephalopods https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/alien-in...
- jdmichal 5y agoIt's OK, Contact prepared me for this. We should use math. Have we tried strobing a 2-3-5-7 sequence at one, and see if it gives us 11? (The above is meant in jest, of course.)
- kwhitefoot 5y ago> (The above is meant in jest, of course.) Sounds like a good idea to me. But of course one needs to be open minded, there are other functions that satisfy the same rules. :-)
- lifthrasiir 5y agoI believe machine translation will coevolve with human languages. The utility of machine translation is clear even when the translation is a bit off, so people will be forced to use machine translation anyway and subsequently tweak their own language to have a better chance for machine translators to pick up its meaning. This is actually also a valid strategy to use MT today.
- irrational 5y agoI say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better.
- lifthrasiir 5y agoOf course this is all speculative and I never said intricacies of human languages will disappear, but human is extremely adaptive. Historically there already had been cases where different languages are used for different social contexts, so we can imagine a similar dichitomy between an informal language (not very amenable to MT) and a formal language (amenable to MT).
- runnerup 5y agoI attempt this when communicating with Chinese parts of my business where English may not be spoken at all. I also don’t know any Chinese. I will generally run my English emails through machine translation back and forth multiple times until I find phrasing and word choices which are “bistable” (I get back the original English). I’ll also usually double check specific critical or unstable words using a variety of translation aids (not machine translation) to ensure any (scope-limited) Chinese I write is actually correct. We do have one native Chinese on my side of the team, and every time I’ve had her check the Chinese she says it’s correct for our technical domain. So we really are already at the point where we can communicate across languages with surprisingly low error rates.
- andai 5y agoGPT-3 handles idioms just fine. Here I tested it on "I fell for her." https://files.catbox.moe/lp6oyg.jpeg https://files.catbox.moe/lp6oyg.jpeg
- jchmrt 5y agoYou're missing the point of the parent comment: GPT-3 can understand this idiom because it was trained on a corpus in which the context for this idiom already existed. If a new idiom would emerge, the system would not necessarily be able to handle it if it can not understand it from the context it was trained on. Therefore, a translating AI needs to be continuously updated.
- kbelder 5y agoIs that any different than a human? They can be pwnded by new idioms.
- jchmrt 5y agoNo it isn't of course, but that speaks for the argument that AGI is necessary for human-level translation :)
- andai 5y agoOr just an up-to-date GPT?
- xyzzyz 5y agoLike, for example, “to be pwned”, which I believe is not going to be understood by majority of English speakers.
- mcguire 5y agoAnd even fewer ML proggies.
- jdmichal 5y agoIt's not really a great argument. Languages are always evolving, so there's always a need to update the system by ingesting new inputs. Even natural general intelligences, aka us humans, learn by repeatedly ingesting the new inputs and perhaps supplementary data, like an explanation from a friend or maybe urbandictionary. EDIT: As an example, how much time is dedicated in schools to explaining turns of phrase and such in Shakespeare. Who at least was writing Modern English. Go back to Chaucer and good luck...
- heavenlyblue 5y agoMachine translation can take the context statistically really well.
- ajuc 5y ago> I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words. It's actually pretty rare, at least for me when I was learning English. Usually I would understand from the context what the idiom must mean, but not necessarily what each word means. For example: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for me in this meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not "hatching from eggs". I think there's 2 styles of learning - breadth-first and depth-first. My wife is a depth-first learner. She would look up every definition as many levels down as needed before going to the next part. It drove me crazy when I studied with her because my stack would overflow. I try to understand the general idea, look how it works, and only then go down into details. She was very frustrated with this because she couldn't deal with "details we ignore for now". In language learning I think depth-first is a bad idea, because meaning of the details change with context. So when I learn a language I don't even look up unfamiliar words if I can still guess the general meaning. After encountering a word many times in different contexts you get intuition on what it means and how it's used much better than if you looked it up and took the first meaning as gospel.
- spoonjim 5y agoPerhaps a better example would be "he was born on third base and thought he hit a home run," vs. "he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth." The latter is easy to figure out but unless you know about baseball it's hard to figure out the first.
- ajuc 5y agoIdioms can be hard when they are presented in abstract like that. But if somebody said "Trump calls himself a genius businessman. He was born on third base and thought he hit a home run." I would know what it means no problem. That's what I meant by guessing from context.
- 5y ago
- pid-1 5y agoI'm 30+ and I can't understand teenagers texting on my own mother language.
- bobsmooth 5y agoBruh
- xdennis 5y agoI don't know if this is a reference to the recent South Park episode, but do teenagers really say "bruh" so much? I thought that was something people said a decade ago, although they used to ironically spell it "bra" sometimes.
- LordDragonfang 5y agoI can confirm that "bruh" is very popular with at least the teens I interact with through online games, yes.
- WorldMaker 5y agoThe spelling change seems to be indicative of the generation shift (and a slightly different pronunciation). From what (little) exposure I've had to teenagers in recent years "bruh" is "correct" (and "bra" is "ancient" and "bro" is "boring"). Slang usage shifts in weird ways.
- scheme271 5y agoI'm pretty sure it's brah, coming from Hawaiian pidgin. It's a shortening of braddah (i.e. brother).
- WorldMaker 5y agoI'm sure both still exist. Slang always is prone to regionalisms and in-group markings. What I've heard (on Xbox voice chat primarily) as commonly used today is "bruh" like much closer to how most people pronounce "duh". I don't know where it originates dialectally other than "often heard in Fortnite and Minecraft". (Definitely the one closer to my youth came closer to "bra"/"brah", and while some of that was assumed to be surfer-originated, I can't tell you how much it was related to Hawaiian pigdin or just convergent evolutionary vowel shifts.)
- aldebran 5y agoSokath, his eyes open!
- SilasX 5y ago>I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words. I know someone who won't sympathize with this difficulty, as he insisted on an obscure abortion joke in the man page for abort(), which will come off as super confusing to anyone who doesn't know the reference. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015644
- lupire 5y agoRMS has been known to make the odd comment (once or twice) where raising awareness of an important idea takes priority over immediate convenience. That doesn't mean he unsympathetic to challenges of foreign languages.
- SilasX 5y agoIf the documentation is intended to be used as a technical reference by people who won’t get the reference, that is, by its nature, unsympathetic to the people who will be using it, no matter what he claims — and I don’t think he has ever actually shown how he’s weighed such concerns.
- dragontamer 5y agoAlmost all foreign language studies I know of include a collection of stories / literature where a number of common sayings are from. Ex: English studies would not be complete without Aesop Fables. Learning the stories is the only way you can understand common phrases / idioms like "sour grapes". Chinese studies includes Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A Chinese Friend of mine explained the meaning of the phrase "Pour the oil", based on some Sima-Yi / Zhuge Liang story from RotTK. (Which IIRC, means something along the lines of "I'm not going to be a sore loser about this") Japanese studies include something about an impenetrable shield and the all-penetrating spear, which apparently is the root word for contradict. Using "Google Translate" on this one, "矛盾" translates into "Contradict". But "矛" means Spear, and "盾" means shield. So a dumb translation would translate "矛盾" into "SpearShield", which is nonsense. But the meaning is "To Contradict".
- ddalex 5y agoDarmok and Jalad at Tanagra
- RangerScience 5y agoWas just going to say, reminds me of the classic Trek HFY sequence: https://imgur.com/gallery/qSmHy https://imgur.com/gallery/qSmHy "what is the work 'fuck' for", the innocent young vulcans want to know. "surely there are more logical intensity modifiers." "yeah, you'd think so," say the weary, jaded vulcan professors, "you'd really fucking think so."
- Izkata 5y agoIt's not quite the same (less action for one), but if the "humans have crazy ideas" aspect is interesting, then the Starfleet Corps of Engineers (aka Star Trek: SCE) novels might be worth a look. Haven't read many of them myself, but "make things work any way you can" is basically how they function.
- Tade0 5y agoThis quote sums up my Italian experience. The language is so full of phrases which - like everything - are regional, that Google Translate often just gives up. My favourite is "in bocca al lupo", which roughly translates to "break a leg" - note the lack of verb. Also that's the current meaning, which changed over the last century. On top of that I remember three commonly used gestures two of which look the same to the uninitiated eye on photos. Overall: his eyes red!
- heavenlyblue 5y agoIdioms are a part of a regular curriculum as much as just plain meanings of works. Another example would by Troy, which was a mythological city until it’s location was discovered.
- Giorgi 5y agonow imagine reading something from genz slang language: Big Yikes fam, Glow up! Periodt
- cryptonector 5y agoOr imagine being autistic and taking things way too literally.
- RajT88 5y agoI've read that English is one of the most idiomatic languages. I believe it.
- Kye 5y agoThat YouTube person who learns languages and surprises native speakers discovered this when he had Chinese teachers rate him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxfTGbSfqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxfTGbSfqA It turns out there are a lot of poems, stories, etc a native speaker would learn in school and apply to their speech that a foreign learner might not even know about. One of the teachers compared this to learning Shakespeare, but I don't think it's nearly as involved in day-to-day speech the way it seems to be for native speakers of Chinese languages. I certainly don't know anything about Shakespeare other than what I picked up from Star Trek even though I'm sure I use things that came from his works all the time without knowing.
- BurningFrog 5y agoThis Finnish comedian trying to makes sense of the word "shit" illustrates this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXH3HDE9Czo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXH3HDE9Czo
- salamanderman 5y agoThat was a fun set! Thank you for posting that.
- dylan604 5y agoSounds like a foreigner's take on George Carlin's old skit
- Izkata 5y agoYoutube is also recommending me another of his videos on the word "ass": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P0Z1yq-2FQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P0Z1yq-2FQ
- dehrmann 5y agoI used to work with a lot of Swedes. I learned literal English translations of several Swedish idioms. I don't think any relied on wordplay, so they worked fine as standalone idioms, with some having similar versions in English (holding thumbs vs. crossing fingers).
- lou1306 5y agoMost of the replies here kind of miss the point and talk about idioms (hatching eggs, dropping shoes, etc.). Idioms are indeed hard, but every languages has their own. So, when you meet eggs, shoes or whatever in a discussion that was not about chickens or fashion, you can at least suspect it's figurative. Meanwhile, "To fall for someone" is not an idiom but a phrasal verb, and these are (imho) much harder than idioms because they do not "signal" their exceptionality as strongly. How am I supposed to know that "falling for someone" does not involve any actual falling, or that when you "make up with someone" you are not really making anything?
- vmception 5y agoOne of my biggest epiphanies was realizing how much dumb hit music was actually partially catering to English as a second language speakers for broader appeal.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you. This isn't a great example; from a dictionary perspective there are three words in the sentence "I fell for her", being "I", "fell for", and "her". Trying to analyze it as the four words "I", "fell", "for", and "her" is doomed to failure[1], because two of those words aren't even present. But if you did know all the words in isolation, you'd have no trouble with the sentence; nothing tricky is going on. (The four-word analysis actually does work, but it would be an unusual reading, with "for her" being a benefactive construction analogous to "I wrote a song for her".) [1] You can get a sense of why this analysis can't succeed by trying to relate "her" as used in the sentence to any standard sense of the preposition "for". ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for#Preposition https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for#Preposition ). None of them work.
- yamrzou 5y agoImagine stumbling upon a "Yes." meme
- cwp 5y agoI always had this problem with Mexican food. - Burrito... ew - Alambre. huh? - "al Pastor" ok, that must be lamb... it's PORK??? WTF??? And then I order "papas con cuero" thinking this must be yet another poetic name for food, and find that it's exactly what it says on the tin[1]. /facepalm [1] "What it says on the tin" is a reference to canned food, where the label on the can is important, because you can't see inside. Of course, the cans are made out of steel these days, but we still... ugh, never mind.
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 5y ago> [...] you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words. This is further exacerbated today where the contexts could be cross-cultural, due to the Internet fostering quicker and communication over borders. I recently ran across a (somewhat off-color) humorous username 「一哭二鬧三上悠亞」: it would have made no sense at all if you only know the Chinese context (first six characters) or the Japanese context (last four characters)! Even though all eight characters are intelligible independently in both Chinese and Japanese.