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Just because human brains are not wired to understand exponential growth doesn't mean you can't understand it. I'm talking about human intuition. I understand

Just because human brains are not wired to understand exponential growth doesn't mean you can't understand it. I'm talking about human intuition. I understand the problems inherent in translation. But again, I still feel it's possible to have instant translation within 10 years. The only way to find out is to wait and see. I'll give you a dollar if I'm wrong in 2023.

dalke 14y ago
ha-ha on myself! I read "With DARPA and Google racing to perfect instant translation" as "PERfect" meaning 100% perfect quality, and not "perFECT" as in to smooth out the details. Well, there goes my PERfect understanding skills. That's not a bet I want to take. We have "instant translation" now - I've seen demos. It's just rather crappy. What level do you expect that we'll have in 10 years? My challenge would be to take chapter 12 of Gödel, Escher, Bach and translate it into Swahili then ask the Swahili speaker if it seems stilted or normal. Well, compared to what a human translator would do. Chapter 12 contains a mixture of English, French, German, and transliterated Russian, but is perfectly understandable to someone who doesn't know the non-English language, because the text describes how to understand the missing parts. It also uses "ASU" as an inversion of "USA", where "ASU" is defined in the text as "Alternative Structure of the Union." Will the translation into Swahili handle that in-text complexity?
- sixQuarks 14y ago
  I don't think 90% of the population can even understand Godel, Escher, Bach, let alone translate it in any meaningful way. You're asking too much from a computer. Perhaps in 30 years that can happen. I think computers will be able to translate very accurately at a middle-school level within 10 years.
  - dalke 14y ago
    This wasn't a hard chapter of GEB. :) Okay, what about Asterix and Obelisk? Still, can you quantify what "very accurately" and "middle-school level" means? Do you think in 10 years that machine translation will be able to translate the following two (independent) paragraphs correctly? Hikaru liked the old English teacher more than the new Scottish one. He still found it hard to understand the replacement's strange dialect as she droned away about the Battle of Agincourt, the Treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle, or how Paris 'deserves a mass', while the boyish Londoner had made far-away European history seem exciting. Hikaru liked the old English teacher most of all. He moved to London only a year ago, and Mrs. Bane had helped him fall in love with the language. Her 40 years of service had not stunted her enthusiasm one bit, as she taught him and her other charges about the subtleties in Shakespeare, the humor in Carroll, and the epic power of Morrison. In the first, "old English teacher" refers to the previous history teacher, who was from London. In the second, it refers to the teacher of English, who is at least 60 years old. In some Germanic languages, the first is written as something akin to "english teacher" and the second "englishteacher." To translate it correctly, the translator has to read ahead to disambiguate the meaning. Which isn't hard, even for middle-school students. But it is hard for computers. In other languages, gender is more important. In the first paragraph, it's very likely that the "old English teacher" is a man, and the new Scottish one is a woman. In the second paragraph, the "old English teacher" is a woman. Is your claim that an automatic translation system will be able to translate these correctly to (say) Swedish or French, within 10 years? I don't see it happening. To do so requires some quite good AI, while much of the progress over the last 10 years has been by rejecting traditional AI and collecting large statistical samples. BTW, the current Swedish translations from Google translate for these are "Hikaru gillade gamla engelsklärare mer än den nya skotska ett." and "Hikaru gillade gamla engelsklärare mest av allt." Both are wrong. The first should be more like "Hikaru gillade den förra engelsk lärare mer än den nya skotska." and the second "Hikaru gillade den gamla engelsklärare mest av allt.

dalke 14y ago

ha-ha on myself! I read "With DARPA and Google racing to perfect instant translation" as "PERfect" meaning 100% perfect quality, and not "perFECT" as in to smooth out the details. Well, there goes my PERfect understanding skills. That's not a bet I want to take. We have "instant translation" now - I've seen demos. It's just rather crappy. What level do you expect that we'll have in 10 years? My challenge would be to take chapter 12 of Gödel, Escher, Bach and translate it into Swahili then ask the Swahili speaker if it seems stilted or normal. Well, compared to what a human translator would do. Chapter 12 contains a mixture of English, French, German, and transliterated Russian, but is perfectly understandable to someone who doesn't know the non-English language, because the text describes how to understand the missing parts. It also uses "ASU" as an inversion of "USA", where "ASU" is defined in the text as "Alternative Structure of the Union." Will the translation into Swahili handle that in-text complexity?

sixQuarks 14y ago
I don't think 90% of the population can even understand Godel, Escher, Bach, let alone translate it in any meaningful way. You're asking too much from a computer. Perhaps in 30 years that can happen. I think computers will be able to translate very accurately at a middle-school level within 10 years.
- dalke 14y ago
  This wasn't a hard chapter of GEB. :) Okay, what about Asterix and Obelisk? Still, can you quantify what "very accurately" and "middle-school level" means? Do you think in 10 years that machine translation will be able to translate the following two (independent) paragraphs correctly? Hikaru liked the old English teacher more than the new Scottish one. He still found it hard to understand the replacement's strange dialect as she droned away about the Battle of Agincourt, the Treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle, or how Paris 'deserves a mass', while the boyish Londoner had made far-away European history seem exciting. Hikaru liked the old English teacher most of all. He moved to London only a year ago, and Mrs. Bane had helped him fall in love with the language. Her 40 years of service had not stunted her enthusiasm one bit, as she taught him and her other charges about the subtleties in Shakespeare, the humor in Carroll, and the epic power of Morrison. In the first, "old English teacher" refers to the previous history teacher, who was from London. In the second, it refers to the teacher of English, who is at least 60 years old. In some Germanic languages, the first is written as something akin to "english teacher" and the second "englishteacher." To translate it correctly, the translator has to read ahead to disambiguate the meaning. Which isn't hard, even for middle-school students. But it is hard for computers. In other languages, gender is more important. In the first paragraph, it's very likely that the "old English teacher" is a man, and the new Scottish one is a woman. In the second paragraph, the "old English teacher" is a woman. Is your claim that an automatic translation system will be able to translate these correctly to (say) Swedish or French, within 10 years? I don't see it happening. To do so requires some quite good AI, while much of the progress over the last 10 years has been by rejecting traditional AI and collecting large statistical samples. BTW, the current Swedish translations from Google translate for these are "Hikaru gillade gamla engelsklärare mer än den nya skotska ett." and "Hikaru gillade gamla engelsklärare mest av allt." Both are wrong. The first should be more like "Hikaru gillade den förra engelsk lärare mer än den nya skotska." and the second "Hikaru gillade den gamla engelsklärare mest av allt.