6 ms·

One funny thing that I found not long ago is that you can traverse a long chain of word translations by re-feeding the translated word. You start with a word le

One funny thing that I found not long ago is that you can traverse a long chain of word translations by re-feeding the translated word. You start with a word let's say in italian, get it translated to spanish. Now you grab that word in spanish and translate back it to italian. You do sometimes a get a different word. You do this again and again. There doesn't seem be a one to one correspondence in certain cases. Don't know if this a known issue nor if some else already spot it.

bjackman 3y ago
A related idea: https://www.translationparty.com/ https://www.translationparty.com/ [Un]fortunately, ja-en machine translation is dramatically better than it was when this website was launched, I guess it was more than 10 years ago. It used to devolve into really bizarre stuff.
taminka 3y ago
maybe the word is a homonym in one language, but isn't in the other languages don't have a strict bijective mapping between them
- liendolucas 3y ago
  But I do get way more accurate and consistent translations from other sites.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  I wish there were tools for diagramming out sentences like this in languages you don't understand. I'm sure it wouldn't help much for understanding the meaning, but it'd be nice to get an exact/terse explanation of its structure. That, or a naive approach that attempts to map everything to mad-libs style sentences. See also; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass
dkdbejwi383 3y ago
There used to be a website that would automate this process until either the phrase stabilised, or it reached a maximum number of iterations.
- viciousvoxel 3y ago
  I'm now imagining what Julia sets or Mandlebrot sets of language would look like...
silisili 3y ago
This is pretty much the reason for the existence(and fun) of translationparty.com....
viciousvoxel 3y ago
Yes it is well known, but I wouldn't call it an issue per se, but rather a demonstration of the ambiguity of natural language. In any given language, many (most?) words have multiple meanings. Even if one of the underlying meanings of each word in your translation chain is "equivalent" (this could be a deep philosophical discussion of semantics on its own), each word-to-word correspondence for each language-pair has a different most-probable choice in the translation model (especially without context to help disambiguate).
jakub_g 3y ago
In "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" show, they take a popular song, translate to some language and translate back, and have the guest sing the massacred version. Search for "jimmy fallon google translate"
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Google Translate sings: "You've Got a Friend in Me" https://youtu.be/yh1I57uleYY https://youtu.be/yh1I57uleYY This is a whole channel with exclusively Google Translate songs and creative content, folks.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mikhailfranco 3y ago
It is essentially a fan-out tree across the thesauruses of the languages, so very unlikely to converge, unless there is one overwhelmingly preferred common meaning in all the languages.

bjackman 3y ago

A related idea: https://www.translationparty.com/ https://www.translationparty.com/ [Un]fortunately, ja-en machine translation is dramatically better than it was when this website was launched, I guess it was more than 10 years ago. It used to devolve into really bizarre stuff.

taminka 3y ago

maybe the word is a homonym in one language, but isn't in the other languages don't have a strict bijective mapping between them

liendolucas 3y ago
But I do get way more accurate and consistent translations from other sites.
extraduder_ire 3y ago
I wish there were tools for diagramming out sentences like this in languages you don't understand. I'm sure it wouldn't help much for understanding the meaning, but it'd be nice to get an exact/terse explanation of its structure. That, or a naive approach that attempts to map everything to mad-libs style sentences. See also; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass

dkdbejwi383 3y ago

There used to be a website that would automate this process until either the phrase stabilised, or it reached a maximum number of iterations.

viciousvoxel 3y ago
I'm now imagining what Julia sets or Mandlebrot sets of language would look like...

silisili 3y ago

This is pretty much the reason for the existence(and fun) of translationparty.com....

viciousvoxel 3y ago

Yes it is well known, but I wouldn't call it an issue per se, but rather a demonstration of the ambiguity of natural language. In any given language, many (most?) words have multiple meanings. Even if one of the underlying meanings of each word in your translation chain is "equivalent" (this could be a deep philosophical discussion of semantics on its own), each word-to-word correspondence for each language-pair has a different most-probable choice in the translation model (especially without context to help disambiguate).

jakub_g 3y ago

In "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" show, they take a popular song, translate to some language and translate back, and have the guest sing the massacred version. Search for "jimmy fallon google translate"

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Google Translate sings: "You've Got a Friend in Me" https://youtu.be/yh1I57uleYY https://youtu.be/yh1I57uleYY This is a whole channel with exclusively Google Translate songs and creative content, folks.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mikhailfranco 3y ago

It is essentially a fan-out tree across the thesauruses of the languages, so very unlikely to converge, unless there is one overwhelmingly preferred common meaning in all the languages.