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The Standard Chinese language was always known to be oddly syntactically close to US English. No one calls it an Indo-European language, but they sometimes feel

The Standard Chinese language was always known to be oddly syntactically close to US English. No one calls it an Indo-European language, but they sometimes feel closer together than English and French on surface levels. Japanese is not like that - even human translations between anything to/from Japanese sound translated.

mitthrowaway2 1y ago
Japanese can especially be tricky to machine-translate because often the subject is missing from a sentence, where it would be required in an equivalent English sentence. The machine translation tends to insert its best guess of a subject (usually "I" or "you"), which can often flip a sentence's meaning inside-out.
- numpad0 1y ago
  I'm thinking there's something deeper or wider than even that. Apparently there's something in Windows 11 right now that says "3 minutes 21 number 2", down to inclusion of the number, because, you know, seconds. I have my own essay on this matter to post on the Internet, but, to say the least, I don't think this mode of failures happen nearly as often in most other languages, if ever. 1: https://twitter.com/inasoft_ayacy/status/1986739607237722409 https://twitter.com/inasoft_ayacy/status/1986739607237722409
Root_Denied 1y ago
There used to be a website called "Translation Party" where you would input a sentence in English and it would auto-translate it to Japanese and back to English over and over until it got to some equilibrium (where the translations were effectively the same) or hit it's upper bound of like 20 ish swings back and forth. It was a fun little tool, but I think that really drove home for me how different Japanese is from English in how it structures itself.
gwd 1y ago
Yeah, I occasionally tell my Chinese friends that the grammar of English and Chinese is actually pretty similar. If they respond with surprise, I'd say, "Have you ever tried to learn Turkish?" Chinese doesn't have conjugation; but the basic sentence structure (subject-verb-object, preposition, etc) are similar. There are of course loads of differences; but nothing nearly so deeply structural as Turkish, where you indicate relationships between things by adding suffixes; or Japanese, which just has a completely different way of bringing up topics.

mitthrowaway2 1y ago

Japanese can especially be tricky to machine-translate because often the subject is missing from a sentence, where it would be required in an equivalent English sentence. The machine translation tends to insert its best guess of a subject (usually "I" or "you"), which can often flip a sentence's meaning inside-out.

numpad0 1y ago
I'm thinking there's something deeper or wider than even that. Apparently there's something in Windows 11 right now that says "3 minutes 21 number 2", down to inclusion of the number, because, you know, seconds. I have my own essay on this matter to post on the Internet, but, to say the least, I don't think this mode of failures happen nearly as often in most other languages, if ever. 1: https://twitter.com/inasoft_ayacy/status/1986739607237722409 https://twitter.com/inasoft_ayacy/status/1986739607237722409

Root_Denied 1y ago

There used to be a website called "Translation Party" where you would input a sentence in English and it would auto-translate it to Japanese and back to English over and over until it got to some equilibrium (where the translations were effectively the same) or hit it's upper bound of like 20 ish swings back and forth. It was a fun little tool, but I think that really drove home for me how different Japanese is from English in how it structures itself.

gwd 1y ago

Yeah, I occasionally tell my Chinese friends that the grammar of English and Chinese is actually pretty similar. If they respond with surprise, I'd say, "Have you ever tried to learn Turkish?" Chinese doesn't have conjugation; but the basic sentence structure (subject-verb-object, preposition, etc) are similar. There are of course loads of differences; but nothing nearly so deeply structural as Turkish, where you indicate relationships between things by adding suffixes; or Japanese, which just has a completely different way of bringing up topics.