21–30 of 62 posts
> You could host a dinner party with eight people at the table speaking eight different languages, and the voice in your ear will always be whispering the one language you want to hear. And at this hypothetical dinner party, what would the earpieces whisper in English (or most other languages) when the Japanese guests said いただきます? Some words just don't have a translation in other languages. https://www.google.com/sea…
> You could host a dinner party with eight people at the table speaking eight different languages, and the voice in your ear will always be whispering the one language you want to hear. And at this hypothetical dinner party, what would the earpieces whisper in English (or most other languages) when the Japanese guests said いただきます? Some words just don't have a translation in other languages. https://www.google.com/sea…
> You could host a dinner party with eight people at the table speaking eight different languages, and the voice in your ear will always be whispering the one language you want to hear. And at this hypothetical dinner party, what would the earpieces whisper in English (or most other languages) when the Japanese guests said いただきます? Some words just don't have a translation in other languages. https://www.google.com/sea…
I've been learning Japanese as of late, and automated translation tools are near useless for anything but sentences that are just a few words stringed together (and even then, nonsense is often returned as soon as a tiny bit of slang or metaphorical language is used). I also have friends who speak languages that are not part of the top 10 most spoken in the world (eg Finnish, Hungarian, etc) and trying to translate t…
Exactly. I've been taking Japanese recently, too, and the grammatical structure of the language alone is enough to show that the "real-time whispering earpiece" as an impossible concept: in English, the verb usually comes near the beginning of a sentence. In Japanese, it's near (or at) the end. Translating one language to the other therefore requires a mental "tape delay", while you map the one grammar onto the other…
This article is BS. Machine translation has been improving but it's still nowhere close to being able to provide real-time translation of spoken languages, and I bet anything it won't be there after another decade. I know for a fact that Baidu is throwing lots of money and people at fundamental R&D in translating Asian languages, and it's no piece of cake. As for "earpieces whispering nearly simultaneous translations…
Could that be paired up with Google Voice? Absolutely.
It's not easy, but it's inevitable.
"...in ten years time." To quote XKCD's translation (sic!), "we haven't finished inventing it yet, but when we do, it'll be awesome." https://xkcd.com/678/ This is the same tired old story that keeps on making rounds for the sixth decade now - "machine translation kind of sucks now, but it will be solved within the next decade!!!!!!!!1!" This is still very much a current paper - note the publication date: http://www.…
I've known several people that have learned English by leaning heavily on automated translation until they got a firmer handle on it. If you tried that in the 1970s you'd still be trying to figure out what the word "the" means.
> You could host a dinner party with eight people at the table speaking eight different languages, and the voice in your ear will always be whispering the one language you want to hear. And at this hypothetical dinner party, what would the earpieces whisper in English (or most other languages) when the Japanese guests said いただきます? Some words just don't have a translation in other languages. https://www.google.com/sea…
«Bon appétit» would be an adequate translation for most English speakers (even though it's French). A more "pure" English translation would probably be a grace of some kind, which serves more or less the same purpose (although I can also see some atheists bristling at a grace where they wouldn't bristle at いただきます or bon appétit).
The idea that one can translate words without understanding what is being said, seems rather similar to an idea that one can infer the meaning of words from their constituent letters. Meaning not only works simultaneously on so many technically inaccessible levels (context, expectations, allusions, previous experiences, etc.), anything mildly interesting (not to mention proper literature), is based by definition on a…
Slovakian or Ukrainian language should be good base for that artificial language, because they are easy to parse and are well developed, with large enough dictionary to cover most cases. Moreover, Ukrainians are very cheap right now, because of war with Russia.