Posted by alexandra_k on January 13, 2019, at 12:31:50
In reply to Machines dont translate like people, posted by Lamdage22 on January 3, 2019, at 12:17:00
It's hard to get machines to translate because lots of words have different meanings depending on the context of the sentence. I've had a few laughs over the years where students have written essays in foreign languages and run it through translation software. You get to a really odd word that doesn't fit at all, and then you think of a synonym for that word that has another meaning as well, where that other meaning fits, It's funny as.
I guess, in theory, you could train up computer software to get better at it. To incorporate aspects of the entire sentance in the translation. I think there is still some way to go, though.
Maybe not at highest levels...
I was fairly interested in what was happening in NZ with respect to politicians over the few years before the last election. We basically had one guy who was in power for a couple elections and the country was being run into the ground. There wasn't a viable alternative, however. The opposition just couldn't get a plausible seeming candidate to win the country's heart.
It started to look like we were being fed avatars... Computer generated or computer enhanced ideology... There is a Dick Francis (I think that's his last name) about Clancy... I think it was.. This leader Clancy... Who would eat certain things and play certain games and it was a computer generated composite kind of a ideology for a nation... To be used for good... But also for profits. Selling sports equipment and the like. Anyway, that started to seem all to real...
I knew someone who worked a bit in linguistics... We like to sell ESL courses, here, to teach English to refugee students or students who like to be kicked down, abused, and oppressed, like we like to treat most of our own people, too. Anyway... The ESL students are often fairly obsessed with sounding like native speakers of English. I guess because peoples attitudes (in these parts anyway) is more likely to track accent than appearance. I mean, in these parts we aren't so very racist (I don't think) -- but we perhaps are really rather more so when it comes to how people speak and their accent.
You need the leaders of the country to not speak with an appreciable accent, you see. Even when they are releatively recent imports / exports from someplace else.
My stepmother learned English as an adult and she still has an accent and makes gramatical errors that show that she didn't grow up hearing / speaking English.
I don't think most people will have access to competent software for translation anytime soon.
You are genuinely bilingual - yeah? I mean fluent in both languages since you were really young?
I was interested in psychology...
Usually (when people only grow up hearing / speaking one language) they can find a fairly distinct localised area that is particularly active for language processing.
When people grow up with more than one then language doesn't seem to get localised in the brain in the same way, though.
When I was at Duke the psych people were saying it was about people being brain damaged growing up bi-lingual. That this was why they were trying to prevent people speaking Spanish in America when they were growing up, and stuff. Because it wrecks their language systems.
:-O
I was shocked.
MOst of the world is bi-lingual (at least), I thought. In which case... Why not think that localisation is the brain damaged case and distributed processing is the 'norm'. There is evidence distributed processing is more robust from stroke and stuff, too.
Anyway...
Sounds like something worthwhile to be doing.
I was looking into the UN and stuff, recently, and was a bit disappointed to learn that you need to be bi-lingual for quite a lot of it... Sweden and Switzerland and all that... I never learned French or German... Regretting it, now. Bye bye civilisation... Cries quietly to self...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1102553
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20181103/msgs/1102753.html