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The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

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Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#51

Post by xiaoma »

jcranmer wrote: post #23
xiaoma wrote: post #19

> 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).

Not really. My Japanese roommate would say いただきます when by himself at his desk before eating a candy bar. It would be surprising if even one English speaker in the world regularly says "Bon appétit" in that situation.

The question isn't, "How do you say いただきます in English." The better question is, "Do English speakers have a set phrase they say right before eating." And the answer is no they don't.

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#52

Post by xiaoma »

rpgmaker wrote: post #34
xiaoma wrote: post #19

> 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…

> Some words just don't have a translation in other languages. Generally speaking I'm inclined to agree with you but you chose a bad example. The earpieces could translate it as "time to eat!" or "thank you for the food.". It's not a literal translation of course but a lot of the work involved with translations is about finding the right substitutes for these kind of phrases. In japanese there's a lot of mundane phra…

懐かしい is another that comes to mind. It's like nostalgia but it's way more positive and can be used as an interjection. Or 我慢する. In fact, I'd say there's a huge array of words that really just don't translate well on their own and yet are often spoken as stand alone sentences.

Meaning just isn't chopped up along the same word boundaries in different languages.

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#53

Post by greggyb »

korginator wrote: post #5

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…

I'll just leave these here.

July 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuWN5AxlgxU

http://www.skype.com/en/translator-preview/

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#54

Post by kazinator »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #41
kazinator wrote: post #20

I suspect real-time machine translation is within reach if the speakers are trained to use a restricted subset of their native language. Moreover, I suspect that this approach could be both realistic and useful. This restricted subset situation is de facto already the case; existing tools don't handle regional dialects and colloquialisms. I just tried "嘘じゃねいぞ" (uso ja nei zo!) in Google Translate and it came up with…

> A restricted subset of your native language is something which you already understand, and learning to speak it is easier than a whole different language. It's interesting to note that before machine translation, there have been attempts to try to standardize restricted subsets of English as a way of making it easier for non-native English speakers (for example "Basic English" and "Basic Global English"). However,…

Obviously the program must have figured out that there are two clauses: "I'm not going to X", where X is "tell him that". How the heck does it go from there to "kare no koto wo iu". If we translate just "tell him that" alone we get ことを彼に伝えます which is okayish. If it would just stick some version of that into the "watashi ha ... tsumori wa arimasen" pattern, it would be progress.

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#55

Post by schoen »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #13
personlurking wrote: post #3

The benefits to this kind of thing are being able to be very specific and go deeper into the subject matter with one's second or third languages. Plus I might argue that smaller languages won't need to die (if everyone can get along and do business in their own tongue). The drawback is that perhaps people who learn languages in the near future will seem like those who study Latin ever since it became a "dead" languag…

Note the qualification of "small- er " languages: you are implying "languages which are still large enough that a translational layer is economically feasible. Small languages (let me pull a number out of thin air and assume <20 million speakers) would still be doomed. Guess what: that means English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Polish for Europe, everyone else kindly GTFO, we don't have resources for implem…

Also German, Ukrainian, Romanian, and Dutch, and, if you count speakers who are geographically outside of Europe together with those inside it, Turkish.

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#56

Post by kazinator »

xiaoma wrote: post #51
jcranmer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

«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).

Not really. My Japanese roommate would say いただきます when by himself at his desk before eating a candy bar. It would be surprising if even one English speaker in the world regularly says "Bon appétit" in that situation. The question isn't, "How do you say いただきます in English." The better question is, "Do English speakers have a set phrase they say right before eating." And the answer is no they don't.

In context, the question is in fact what should come out of the English-speaking listener's earpiece to explain the "itadakimasu" utterance from the Japanese speaker, whether or not the English speaker has a custom of uttering anything before any meal or snack.

Suppose English speakers did always say "Bon appétit", even when eating alone and just a snack. It's still not the meaning of "itadakimasu". Wishing for gusto in eating is not the same thing as humbly receiving the meal/snack.

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#57

Post by [deleted] »

distances wrote: post #36
pmontra wrote: post #12

It must work offline. One of the reasons is that tourists often don't buy a data plan (imagine a tour of Europe with a different country every couple of days) and wifi is not where you might need machine translation most, on the road.

Many European mobile contracts allow a bucket of roaming data (400MB per month for me). Not sure what's the status for prepaid SIM cards that tourists from outside of Europe would likely have. Also, the roaming costs in EU are regulated, with likely price decreases also in the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulat...

[deleted]

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#58

Post by personlurking »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #13
personlurking wrote: post #3

The benefits to this kind of thing are being able to be very specific and go deeper into the subject matter with one's second or third languages. Plus I might argue that smaller languages won't need to die (if everyone can get along and do business in their own tongue). The drawback is that perhaps people who learn languages in the near future will seem like those who study Latin ever since it became a "dead" languag…

Note the qualification of "small- er " languages: you are implying "languages which are still large enough that a translational layer is economically feasible. Small languages (let me pull a number out of thin air and assume <20 million speakers) would still be doomed. Guess what: that means English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Polish for Europe, everyone else kindly GTFO, we don't have resources for implem…

Sorry, I don't quite follow your intended meaning, but I will try to expand on my initial comment below.

If it no longer matters what language someone speaks, a language with fewer speakers than others wouldn't need to become extinct, as will happen without tech-aided interpretation. Of course, the viability of a language isn't solely connected to the ability for a native speaker to do commerce in it, but I would imagine it's nonetheless an important factor.

From Wikipedia's article 'Lists of endangered langauges':

"While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that even in a conservative scenario, about half of today's languages will become extinct within the next fifty to one hundred years."

I would hope that even languages with 3,000 speakers could be 'saved', in the scenario I propose (assuming a Wikipedic-style worldwide effort - in conjunction with the tech sector, governments and linguists - to get as many languages as possible implemented).

Re: The Language Barrier Is About to Fall

#59

Post by radarsat1 »

tomp wrote: post #14
radarsat1 wrote: post #9

I'm currently living in a country where I don't speak the language. I can't believe how incredible translation tools are. Even though I don't understand when people speak to me, I can write and read emails, and accomplish things that would be incredibly more difficult without this ability (e.g. talking to my insurance agent). And when I say I can read and write emails, I mean it can do so in about 1.5x longer than a…

What is the other language, and how similar is it to English (or other languages you know)? (Beofre you answer, my predicted answer is "very similar".)

Similar enough, certainly. More similar to my second language. (I know French, I'm learning Spanish.)

It definitely lowers the barrier, but don't think there's no barrier just because it's a "similar" language. I'm claiming that automatic translation has accelerated my learning, not that learning it would be impossible otherwise.

Nonetheless it is quite difficult to live somewhere where you don't speak the language, no matter what tools you have available. Mostly it doesn't matter, but when you find yourself arguing with administrators... or the police...

(I almost got into a bike accident the other day. I wasn't even all that worried about my health, I was mostly scared of having to talk to people, hospital/police/insurance..! or argue with the guy who hit me...)

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