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Early in my career I spent a lot of time thinking that HTML was antiquated. "Obviously they had 20th century ideas on what websites would be. As if we're all ju

Early in my career I spent a lot of time thinking that HTML was antiquated. "Obviously they had 20th century ideas on what websites would be. As if we're all just publishing documents." But the beauty of HTML eventually clicked for me: it's describing the semantics of a structured piece of data, which means you can render a perfectly valid view of it however you want if you've got the right renderer! I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data. Yes, there's a canonical language which, in many cases, contains information that gets lost when translated (see: opinions on certain books really needing to be read in their original language). I think Chrome got it right at one point where it would say "This looks like it's in French. Want to translate it? Want me to always do this?" (Though I expect Chrome to eventually get it wrong as they keep over-fitting their ad engagement KPIs) This is all a coffee morning way of saying: I believe that the browser must own the rendering choices. Don't reimplement pieces of the browser in your website!

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data This is a tempting illusion, but the evidence implies it’s false. Translation is simulation, not emulation.
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago
  What evidence are you thinking of? The parent comment is essentially correct that translations of the same material into different languages represent different views of the same data. A human translator must put in quite a bit of effort establishing what underlying situation is being described by a stretch of language. Machine translations don't do this; they attempt to map one piece of language to another piece of (a different) language directly.
  - justinclift 11mo ago
    Relatedly, I tend to think of translations somewhat similar to a lossy system like those used in (say) image compression. ie a compressed jpg of an image can retain quite a lot of the detail of the original, but it can introduce its own artifacts and lose some of the details For things where the overall shape and picture is all that's required, that's fine. For things where the fine details matter, it's less fine. Translations seem to be similar in that regard.

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

> I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data This is a tempting illusion, but the evidence implies it’s false. Translation is simulation, not emulation.

thaumasiotes 11mo ago
What evidence are you thinking of? The parent comment is essentially correct that translations of the same material into different languages represent different views of the same data. A human translator must put in quite a bit of effort establishing what underlying situation is being described by a stretch of language. Machine translations don't do this; they attempt to map one piece of language to another piece of (a different) language directly.
- justinclift 11mo ago
  Relatedly, I tend to think of translations somewhat similar to a lossy system like those used in (say) image compression. ie a compressed jpg of an image can retain quite a lot of the detail of the original, but it can introduce its own artifacts and lose some of the details For things where the overall shape and picture is all that's required, that's fine. For things where the fine details matter, it's less fine. Translations seem to be similar in that regard.