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AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

technologyreview.com

11–20 of 84 posts

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#11

> Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and instead must rely on other languages. The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with trans…

That last part creates a chicken and egg problem. You can argue about it but I will bet it will never get traction if there is no basis to start from.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#13
post #5
post #4

I'm surprised this story didn't mention the scandal with Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-... > an American teenager – who does not speak Scots, the language of Robert Burns – has been revealed as responsible for almost half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia It wasn't malicious either, it was someone who started editing Wikipedia at 12 and naively fa…

[flagged]

Jfc, not everything is about that.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#14

> Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and instead must rely on other languages. The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with trans…

The end of the article says they have closed it.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#15
post #3

It's ironic that the "solution" to the problem is being driven by yet another person that isn't native to Greenland. While they may be a Greenlandic teacher, it's almost assured that they are teaching western Greenlandic, which is similar to Canadian Inuktitut. People in the East of Greenland speak a language that has similarities, but is different enough in vocabulary and sounds that it's often considered a separate…

As someone who isn't a native English speaker, I believe most people who use the Internet would benefit from simply learning English rather than having an unchecked AI translate things to them. Reddit for example has joined millions of terrible Wordpress websites in auto-translating everything for SEO purposes and Google seems to be fine with this for some reason. It's ironic that it has reached the point that if you search for a "multi-language" plugin for Wordpress, most of the results aren't about letting you write an article in multiple languages, they're just about automatically translating a single article to 30 languages with machine translation.

The reason none of this makes sense to me is that it's intellectually crippling Internet users. Computers and the Internet are tools. If you want something machine translated to you, you can use a tool like Google translate to translate it for you. If the webmaster does this, it robs people from the opportunity to learn to use those tools and they become dependent on third parties to do this for them when they would have a lot more freedom if they just did it themselves (or if they learned English).

Teach a man to fish...

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#16
post #11

> Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and instead must rely on other languages. The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with trans…

That last part creates a chicken and egg problem. You can argue about it but I will bet it will never get traction if there is no basis to start from.

Wikipedia has an "incubator" setup where people can start working on a language in the incubator until it demonstrates enough interest.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#17
post #3

It's ironic that the "solution" to the problem is being driven by yet another person that isn't native to Greenland. While they may be a Greenlandic teacher, it's almost assured that they are teaching western Greenlandic, which is similar to Canadian Inuktitut. People in the East of Greenland speak a language that has similarities, but is different enough in vocabulary and sounds that it's often considered a separate…

> People in the East of Greenland speak a language that has similarities, but is different enough in vocabulary and sounds that it's often considered a separate language and not a dialect.

If this is true, then the easy solution would be to just have two separate wikipedia editions (assuming there is interest).

After all if we have en, sco, jam and ang, surely there is room for two greenlandics. The limitting factor is user interest.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#18
Wikipedia editors is among the many communities that have for a long time mostly successfully relied on the tendency of relatively superficial, easy to validate capabilities (such as being able to use a website, write something resembling real language, and handle basic communication) to correlate with more valuable but harder to validate qualities (such as ability to write reasonably well and follow rules/guidelines, and generally being a well-intentioned person) as one of their main barriers to entry. Attributable to the deluge of commercial LLMs[0] available at such low prices that their operators lose millions to billions of dollars in order to gain market share and ultimately profit, such communities may not be able to continue to exist as is for long, I suspect: either they would be forced to institute more intrusive barriers (be that ID verification, invite-only memberships, or something else) while the deluge lasts, or they may be effectively destroyed when members secretly lacking the requisite qualities and act in bad faith become a majority, damage community’s reputation, and drive out the existing members.

[0] Which paradoxically to a significant degree exist thanks to the unpaid work of volunteers in many of such communities.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#19

If nobody's reading them and nobody's writing them, then perhaps it doesn't matter. We could let Wikipedia-Greenlandic persist as its own evolved language that forks from the original. > potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them. OK? We have lots of dead languages. It's fine. People use whatever languages are appropriate to them…

I see that this comment get downvoted but I think we can agree on the facts that languages, just like species, die while other flourish. And that's fine. Survival of the fittest, right ? Not enough people speaking Greenlandic, too complicated even for it's own population who would rather speak danish ? The very reason I'm speaking English is because it was forced military during the 19th century by the UK and since t…

As an immigrant to an anglophone country, I noticed a few things:

When people have varying levels of capability with languages, they’ll switch to whatever is the lowest common denominator — the language that the group can best communicate in. This tended to be English, even amongst a bunch of native speakers of a common foreign language.

Moreover, this is context dependent: when talking about technical matters (especially computing), the Lingua Franca (pun intended) is English. You’ll hear “locals” switch to either mixed or pure English, even if they’re not great at it. Science, aviation, etc… is the same.

Before English it was French that had this role, and before then it was Latin and Greek.

The thing is, when the whole world speaks one common language like Latin or English, this is a tiny bit sad for some Gaelic tribe that got wiped out culturally, but incredibly valuable for everybody everywhere. International commerce becomes practical. Students can study overseas, spreading ideas further and wider. Books have a bigger market, attracting smarter and better authors. There’s a bigger pool of talented authors to begin with, some of which write educational textbooks of exceptional sparkling quality. These all compound to create a more educated, vibrant, and varied culture… because of, not despite the single language.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#20
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Jfc, not everything is about that.

I meant it as an example of--road to hell paved with good intentions and "and naively failed to recognise the damage they were doing".

But you do you.

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