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No Language Left Behind

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Re: No Language Left Behind

#101

Post by aeontech »

bobsmooth wrote: post #71
Etheryte wrote: post #24

I'll believe it when I actually see it. I'm a native of a reasonably small language spoken by about a million people and never have I ever seen a good automatic translation for it. The only translations that are good are the ones that have been manually entered, and those that match the structure of the manually entered ones. I think the sentiment is laudable and wish godspeed to the people working on this, but for t…

There's a section where you can try reading translated children's books. See if your language is supported and how good the translation is.

Surprisingly, translations of the books into Russian seem considerably better than into English (at least for the first three books I tried)

Re: No Language Left Behind

#102

Post by [deleted] »

hello_im_angela wrote: post #31
Etheryte wrote: post #24

I'll believe it when I actually see it. I'm a native of a reasonably small language spoken by about a million people and never have I ever seen a good automatic translation for it. The only translations that are good are the ones that have been manually entered, and those that match the structure of the manually entered ones. I think the sentiment is laudable and wish godspeed to the people working on this, but for t…

It's an extremely difficult problem indeed. A lot of people on the team speak low-resource languages too (my native language as well!), so definitely resonate with what you're saying. My overall feeling is: yeah it's hard, and after decades we can't even do German translation perfectly. But if we don't work on it, it's not gonna happen. I really hope that people who are excited about technology for more languages can…

[deleted]

Re: No Language Left Behind

#103

Post by mikewarot »

gfaster wrote: post #77
mikewarot wrote: post #16

The analogy I like the most is that they've found the "shape" of languages in high dimensions, and if you rotate the shape for English the right way, you get an unreasonably good fit for the shape of Spanish, again for all the other languages. We're at a point where it's now possible to determine the shape of every language, provided there are enough speakers of the language left who are both able and willing to help…

Anyone who knows or is learning another language can easily tell you that the "warping" methodology of MTL is insufficient. There was a really good video by Tom Scott [1] that talked about this but the short version is that there is critical bits of language in context and inferred by speakers. Any accurate MTL needs nearly full context both on the page and in the cultural moment, in addition to probably needing to a…

So, if I had a corpus of all the literature from 1800-1850 digitized, the context would be sufficiently different as to be a new language?

It seems to me that the happy accident of doing this research at the start of getting all human knowledge digitized is part of the unreasonable effectiveness of this overall technique.

Had it happened in 200 years, it might not have worked, right?

Re: No Language Left Behind

#104

Post by visarga »

microtherion wrote: post #50

As a native Swiss German speaker, my native language is not only low resource in general, but has the additional difficulty of not having a standardized orthography (many native speakers will exclusively write in Standard German, and use Swiss German only for spoken communication). So you have a language with some economic opportunity (a few million speakers in a fairly wealthy country) but no clearly defined written…

Another avenue for machine translation is to use audio instead of text. There is much more audio data available and being generated on a daily basis, especially for cases like yours it would be very useful.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#105

Post by tkgally »

jw4ng wrote: post #19

Jeff Wang here with my fellow Meta AI colleague Angela Fan from No Languages left Behind, seeing the comments flowing through. If you want to ask us anything, go for it!

Thank you for your exciting work and for coming onto HN to respond to questions.

I am a former professional translator (Japanese to English) and am now supervising research at the University of Tokyo on the use of machine translation in second-language education. As I have written in a few papers and essays [1], advances in MT have raised serious questions for language teachers. The ready availability of MT today, including on Facebook and Instagram, means that language students use it a lot while studying. We don’t know yet, though, how that use of MT might affect our students’ acquisition of other languages or their motivation to keep studying those languages.

One of the hurdles educators and researchers face is finding out how MT is being used in the real world. Most education in modern languages is focused on giving students language skills that they will be able to use later in work, education, and daily life, and textbooks and other learning materials are typically shaped around real-world situations. We are now struggling to adapt those materials for the age of MT, because data on the actual use of MT is very hard to get.

Like Google, Microsoft, Baidu, DeepL, and others, Meta must have huge amounts of data on how your users are using MT to communicate. Any information and insights about that MT usage that you can share with world—just as you have generously shared your NLLB models—would be most welcome.

[1] http://gally.net/writings.html

Re: No Language Left Behind

#106

Post by yosito »

Etheryte wrote: post #24

I'll believe it when I actually see it. I'm a native of a reasonably small language spoken by about a million people and never have I ever seen a good automatic translation for it. The only translations that are good are the ones that have been manually entered, and those that match the structure of the manually entered ones. I think the sentiment is laudable and wish godspeed to the people working on this, but for t…

I speak a medium-resource language with 11 million speakers. Google Translate works so poorly with it that translations are often nonsensical. But DeepL works so well with it that translations are often indistinguishable from native speaking translations. I'm a big believer that the model can make a huge difference.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#107

Post by Gigachad »

azinman2 wrote: post #64
hello_im_angela wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an extremely difficult problem indeed. A lot of people on the team speak low-resource languages too (my native language as well!), so definitely resonate with what you're saying. My overall feeling is: yeah it's hard, and after decades we can't even do German translation perfectly. But if we don't work on it, it's not gonna happen. I really hope that people who are excited about technology for more languages can…

> But if we don't work on it, it's not gonna happen. That’s exactly right. There’s too much bias in society that if something isn’t perfect, then why bother? Nothing is perfect, so with that attitude there can be no progress. Thank you for doing important work!

Personally I'm hoping that globalisation prunes out as many languages as possible before we end up with brain implants automatically translating everything for us and no one can communicate without these chips.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#108

Post by kgeist »

I wonder how it differs from what Yandex.Translate did back in 2016: [0]

>The affinity of languages allows one common model to be trained for their translation. That is, “under the hood” of the translator, the same neural network translates into Russian from Yakut, Tatar, Chuvash and other Turkic languages. This approach is called many-to-one, that is, "from many languages \u200b\u200binto one." This is a more versatile tool than the classic bilingual neural network. And most importantly, it is the many-to-one approach that makes it possible to use knowledge about the structure and vocabulary of the Turkic languages, learned on the rich material of Turkish or Tatar, to translate languages like Chuvash or Yakut, which are less “resource-rich”, but no less important for the cultural diversity of the planet.

>In order to create a unified model for translating Turkic languages, Yandex developed a synthetic common script. Any Turkic language is translated into it, so that, for example, the Tatar “dүrt” (“four”) written in Cyrillic becomes similar to the Turkish dört (“four”), not only from the point of view of a person, but also at the level of similarity of lines for a computer.

This way they added support for Turkic and Uralic languages which are very underrepresented on the Internet. But I don't know what the quality of their translation is: even though I live in a region where Mari is spoken (indigenous Uralic language) and my wife is Mari, none of us, sadly, speak the language.

[0] https://techno-yandex-ru.translate.goog/machine-translation/...

Re: No Language Left Behind

#109

Post by cyphar »

yosito wrote: post #106
Etheryte wrote: post #24

I'll believe it when I actually see it. I'm a native of a reasonably small language spoken by about a million people and never have I ever seen a good automatic translation for it. The only translations that are good are the ones that have been manually entered, and those that match the structure of the manually entered ones. I think the sentiment is laudable and wish godspeed to the people working on this, but for t…

I speak a medium-resource language with 11 million speakers. Google Translate works so poorly with it that translations are often nonsensical. But DeepL works so well with it that translations are often indistinguishable from native speaking translations. I'm a big believer that the model can make a huge difference.

On the other hand, as a non-native Japanese learner, it is very obvious when Japanese text has been DeepL-translated because it often makes 敬語/register and context mistakes (and translating Japanese to English it does even worse because it struggles with null-subject languages). I am sure a native Japanese speaker would be able to see even more mistakes than I can.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#110

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

madrox wrote: post #73
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #27

My concern with this is that in low resource languages the unavoidable biases of the ML models might overpower their own organic development. We shrug off all the little quirks of machine translated text because it usually gets the point across, and we recognize them as quirks because most of what we read was written by real people with no such quirks. But when most of what you read contain those quirks, I fear those…

This happens without machine translation in the wild already with pidgin. If you want to see real life pidgin in action, watch korean and english gamers interact in FPS games. This has been common at the borders of cultures where two languages interact. Point being, I'm not sure if language purity is more valuable than functionally allowing its people to interact with things they couldn't otherwise. Put another way,…

> This happens without machine translation in the wild already with pidgin.

I said nothing about purity, I said organic evolution, which this is an example of. If the actual speakers want to develop a pidgin, fine, I just think it should be a decision made by people and not models.

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