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> I am nearly certain that no machine will ever be able to accurately translate between languages with significant linguistic distance (e.g. Japanese and Swedis

> I am nearly certain that no machine will ever be able to accurately translate between languages with significant linguistic distance (e.g. Japanese and Swedish). Is that really the reason? Or rather the fact that there is much less training data available?

naniwaduni 3y ago
Languages even moderately distant tend to strain the concept of an accurate translation in the first place for any nontrivial utterance.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  Eh, I speak both English and Japanese and I would say that what counts as accurate translation is what is most proximate to that threshold of fundamental dissimilarity. Measuring translation accuracy for all languages the same way is more the problem here. There is no such thing as 1-1 to translation. It’s more like 1-(1+n) where n accounts for said distance. For languages with shared origins, n can be fairly small, while for those with entirely separate ones, it can be quite large. That being said, Japanese to English translation in things like popular culture tends to take far too many liberties, I expect because the culture around Japanese translation in America has a very annoying, Orientalist bent, with people getting off on their “expertise” about a fake exoticism.
  - naniwaduni 3y ago
    The fact that you have to have this conversation strongly implies that the notion of an accurate translation is, no surprise, already heavily strained; you've simply chosen to aim for/accept "most accurate possible translation" as the best you can do, while punting on choice of distance metric and its scale.
    - bugglebeetle 3y ago
      …or simply that words don’t have universal meanings, but general ones that vary by use and context.
      - naniwaduni 3y ago
        Correct. The enumerable configurations of expressible shades of meaning are pretty sparse, and don't line up well between languages.
        bugglebeetle 3y ago
        …which means “accurate translation” has different meanings relative to the languages you’re referring to, as I first pointed out.
  - mcswell 3y ago
    All your base are belong to us.

naniwaduni 3y ago

Languages even moderately distant tend to strain the concept of an accurate translation in the first place for any nontrivial utterance.

bugglebeetle 3y ago
Eh, I speak both English and Japanese and I would say that what counts as accurate translation is what is most proximate to that threshold of fundamental dissimilarity. Measuring translation accuracy for all languages the same way is more the problem here. There is no such thing as 1-1 to translation. It’s more like 1-(1+n) where n accounts for said distance. For languages with shared origins, n can be fairly small, while for those with entirely separate ones, it can be quite large. That being said, Japanese to English translation in things like popular culture tends to take far too many liberties, I expect because the culture around Japanese translation in America has a very annoying, Orientalist bent, with people getting off on their “expertise” about a fake exoticism.
- naniwaduni 3y ago
  The fact that you have to have this conversation strongly implies that the notion of an accurate translation is, no surprise, already heavily strained; you've simply chosen to aim for/accept "most accurate possible translation" as the best you can do, while punting on choice of distance metric and its scale.
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    …or simply that words don’t have universal meanings, but general ones that vary by use and context.
    - naniwaduni 3y ago
      Correct. The enumerable configurations of expressible shades of meaning are pretty sparse, and don't line up well between languages.
      - bugglebeetle 3y ago
        …which means “accurate translation” has different meanings relative to the languages you’re referring to, as I first pointed out.
- mcswell 3y ago
  All your base are belong to us.