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Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

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Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#41

Post by Jtarii »

tekno45 wrote: post #23
TFNA wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art is perennial and omnipresent in human societies, but the sort of art that operates through a language foreign to the aficionado’s own, and learning that language would be beneficial to appreciation of it, is obviously going to be a niche subset of art.

basic puns and rhyming are niche forms of art?

Puns and rhyming can generally be translated across languages. I don't think its controversial to say that its possible to get most of what a piece of art is trying to say through a translation.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#42

Post by asveikau »

Jtarii wrote: post #41
tekno45 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

basic puns and rhyming are niche forms of art?

Puns and rhyming can generally be translated across languages. I don't think its controversial to say that its possible to get most of what a piece of art is trying to say through a translation.

Puns generally do not translate well.

Where they do, there needs to be a coincidence where words with multiple definitions happen to have the same meanings in both languages, or there happens to be a similar saying in the target language. Often this is not the case. Translators often just make up entirely new material to substitute in for that.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#43

Post by asveikau »

Thraway198 wrote: post #35
asveikau wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you a very simple example I saw recently. I saw a dad joke in Spanish on social media and it gave me a chuckle. It was a comment to a lawyer's video and it translates to "can I study law if I'm a leftie?" It relies on the fact that law is also a word for "right". AI won't be able to succinctly translate that joke and have it hit the same way. As an experiment I just fed that into ChatGPT, and it did explain…

It can't now. It will be able to in the future, when the translation actually becomes fluent for the user.

My point is that a succinct and correct translation for the pun does not exist in the target language.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#44

Post by mcswell »

asveikau wrote: post #4
TFNA wrote: post #3

Sadly, this beneficial activity doesn’t look promising in the longterm. Real-time interpretation of foreign languages through earbuds is already available in its nascent phase, and China at least has begun cutting foreign-language programmes at its unis because such AI translation is seen as the way of future. Once this tool becomes adopted enough societally, the learning of foreign languages is going to become a ver…

I think any multilingual person will be skeptical of your analysis. Translation is not a substitute for understanding the original. It's good that we have translations, but it isn't the same. As you get into consuming art, literature, poetry, commentary, this is relevant.

1) But for many people and in many situations, translation---including MT---is good enough. And that overcomes any perceived need to learn another language (which learning may be in opposition to learning something else, something perceived as more important).

2) Most people don't "consume" literature or poetry, and it's unclear to me that non-performance art requires language. (I appreciate Rennaissance painting, but apart from the occasional Latin writing I don't need language to understand it.)

Disclaimer: Besides English, I'm reasonably fluent in Spanish (more so 35 years ago when I last lived in a Spanish speaking country), and used to be reasonably fluent in German, French, Tzeltal and Shuar (and a bit of Italian and written classical Greek). So I have every reason to hope this study is correct. But I have my doubts.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#45

Post by mcswell »

asveikau wrote: post #31
Thraway198 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI will be able to do all that for you. What you're touching on is the difference between comprehension vs merely being a vessel for information.

I'll give you a very simple example I saw recently. I saw a dad joke in Spanish on social media and it gave me a chuckle. It was a comment to a lawyer's video and it translates to "can I study law if I'm a leftie?" It relies on the fact that law is also a word for "right". AI won't be able to succinctly translate that joke and have it hit the same way. As an experiment I just fed that into ChatGPT, and it did explain…

I once saw a political cartoon that said "No votar basura." It played on the homophony between 'votar' = "to vote" and 'botar' = "to throw out."

That said, there are plenty of jokes in English. Stop me if you've heard this one...

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#46

Post by supertrope »

TFNA wrote: post #3

Sadly, this beneficial activity doesn’t look promising in the longterm. Real-time interpretation of foreign languages through earbuds is already available in its nascent phase, and China at least has begun cutting foreign-language programmes at its unis because such AI translation is seen as the way of future. Once this tool becomes adopted enough societally, the learning of foreign languages is going to become a ver…

Mass market GPS navigation devices haven't made learning how to navigate a city like a local obsolete. If you've ever seen a gig economy driver get lost despite having step by step instructions...

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#47

Post by iLemming »

elpakal wrote: post #11
thisoneisreal wrote: post #2

One thing I've never seen discussed on this topic (possible I just missed it, I only read popular accounts) is whether speaking multiple languages is a proxy for higher sociability / stronger social ties. That's a known dimension that improves health and aging and I wonder if just being able or interested in speaking with a broader swath of people is what helps more than the cognitive demands of switching.

Raised multilingual here (as in father spoke one, mother spoke another, living abroad and US back and forth). I don't know about the stronger social ties but I have found that thinking in a different language helps me get to sleep easier. There are times when I'm spinning around in webs in English (work, life etc) at night, and when I switch over to Spanish thoughts I fall asleep easier. Maybe just stuff like that is…

> helps me get to sleep easier

I grew up speaking multiple languages. My monolingual friend once asked in which language I dream, and I said - "not sure, I think in all three different ones I'm currently fluent". "But how do you know?", he kept pressing. "Ah, well, they come with subtitles", I joked. But since then I often wonder, how do we recognize a language in our dreams?

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#48

Post by fluoridation »

westurner wrote: post #12
comrade1234 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning German hasn't made me more sociable.

But there was neurogenesis. And, just thinking about other cultures

But it still counters the claim that multilingualism is a proxy for high sociability. I speak two languages (and I'm working on a third) and most days I don't speak to anyone.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#49

Post by fluoridation »

mcswell wrote: post #44
asveikau wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think any multilingual person will be skeptical of your analysis. Translation is not a substitute for understanding the original. It's good that we have translations, but it isn't the same. As you get into consuming art, literature, poetry, commentary, this is relevant.

1) But for many people and in many situations, translation---including MT---is good enough. And that overcomes any perceived need to learn another language (which learning may be in opposition to learning something else, something perceived as more important). 2) Most people don't "consume" literature or poetry, and it's unclear to me that non-performance art requires language. (I appreciate Rennaissance painting, bu…

Translation is good enough, but quite often no translation exists. MTL is at this point good enough for simple texts and for everyday living like restaurant menus and shopping, but any even mild complexity in a text, like long-running context (necessary for consistent translation of terminology), puns, purposeful ambiguity, etc., MTL is completely unable to cope with. It just doesn't work and it will likely never work.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#50

Post by westurner »

fluoridation wrote: post #48
westurner wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there was neurogenesis. And, just thinking about other cultures

But it still counters the claim that multilingualism is a proxy for high sociability. I speak two languages (and I'm working on a third) and most days I don't speak to anyone.

99% of users are lurkers.

I also find myself exercising verbal skills possibly unnecessarily (with a language learning app that's certainly not immersion) but probably predictably.

I've heard that they say to exercise mental arithmetic skills if stranded on a desert island with no reading material; and that it's normal to develop self dialogue in solitary

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