Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No Language Left Behind

ai.facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 166 posts

Re: No Language Left Behind

#131

Post by tkgally »

yosito wrote: post #115
tkgally wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, in…

I've learned two languages with the help of MT. I'm sure you've interviewed people like me, but I get excited about the potential of MT for language learning, so I'd like to share my thoughts. When I learned Spanish, I spent a lot of time chatting on Facebook with native speakers, and using Google Translate as "training wheels" to help me formulate sentences, and understand words and phrases I hadn't learned yet. It…

Thank you! Those are really interesting and valuable comments. I haven’t, in fact, heard many stories like yours, especially with such clear insights about how you have been able to use MT constructively in your language learning.

Most of the discussions I’ve had about MT have focused on language learning in school contexts. In Japan and most other countries (though often not in English-speaking countries), all children have to study at least one foreign language in school. As with all compulsory education, low motivation and poor study skills are a constant problem. In such contexts, MT seems to many teachers and students just to be a way to cheat on classwork. And since very few of today’s veteran teachers were able to use MT when we were young and studying languages, we don’t understand how we can guide even our motivated students on using it productively. I will be sure to share your insights with my colleagues.

A couple of comments:

> More than once, while not using MT, I was told that I spoke Spanish with a "Google Translate accent", which I'm sure was more of a reference to my grammar than my accent....

This can happen with traditional methods of language learning, too. The language of textbooks, like the output of MT, usually reflects the standard written language, which can be very different from how people actually speak, especially in the case of languages with large dialect and register variations.

> When I use MT, I have a simple rule, that I have to understand each word of a translation before I send it.

That sounds like an excellent rule. I will pass on that advice to educators I know who are trying to figure out how to guide their students on the use of MT.

Many thanks again.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#132

Post by tsm »

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…

Similar issue with Scots, which has many variant orthographies but is frequently written in mostly-English anyway.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#133

Post by raverbashing »

cyphar wrote: post #125
pmontra wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Becoming bilingual is one thing. Completely extinguishing a language is a totally different matter. It is usually associated with migrating away from the geographic area of the language and/or physically losing speakers (old age, wars, genocides, etc.) You can check the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e... To make an example and be blunt: I do not expect any European country officia…

There are several reasons a language can go extinct, and while the reasons you mentioned are included there are several other reasons that you didn't consider. The most common way language death occurs is through contact with a prestige language, which results in social pressure that makes the non-prestige language become less and less commonly spoken[1]. A community becoming bilingual is part of this process -- it d…

Icelandic won't disappear soon. (it's a bit of a mistake to say latin disappeared but I digress)

It might take some work (and more media being produced in it, surely) but I don't think it's at risk

> because smartphones do not support their native language

Nowhere in the article says that. And most smartphones do even have support (including the Icelandic keyboard)

what is not supported is voice activated devices:

> "“Not being able to speak Icelandic to voice-activated fridges, interactive robots and similar devices would be yet another lost field,"

Re: No Language Left Behind

#134

Post by adrianN »

eCa wrote: post #124
Gigachad wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> prunes out as many languages as possible Would you feel the same way if that includes all languages you know, including all versions of English?

I'm still a bit disappointed that Esperanto isn't the official language of the EU.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#135

Post by adrianN »

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…

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#136

Post by bertil »

thamer wrote: post #128

Does this mean that Facebook's advertising system will finally start rejecting ads calling for genocide in Myanmar, and that they will finally flag comments expressing the same intent? As recently as March of this year there were reports that Facebook accepted ads that said "The current killing of the Kalar is not enough, we need to kill more!" or "They are very dirty. The Bengali/Rohingya women have a very low stand…

The issue here wasn’t that Facebook didn’t have resources for a basic translation tool (able to translate open death threats) but that Burmese had inconsistent encoding. That delayed the translation effort.

https://www.localizationlab.org/blog/2019/3/25/burmese-font-...

Re: No Language Left Behind

#137

Post by MrPatan »

eCa wrote: post #124
Gigachad wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> prunes out as many languages as possible Would you feel the same way if that includes all languages you know, including all versions of English?

How would you feel about being the one that has to teach your children a language that will hinder their prospects instead of one that will help them succeed, just so that the speakers of the bigger language feel good about themselves that they are good people or something?

Re: No Language Left Behind

#138

Post by bertil »

otreblatercero wrote: post #87

Not a single mesoamerican language is present. Maya, Náhuatl, Otomí, Zapoteco, etc. And these languages are big, they are spoken by millions and even have literature. Náhuatl and Maya are spoken in Central America.

Are there online corpora, like Wikipedia, that could be used to train the models? Are those under a permissive enough license to be used for model training?

If there are spoken, with enough budget, a library of voices could be recorded. I think you’d prefer that collection to be gathered and maintained by a non-profit rather than Meta.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#139

Post by thriftwy »

aeontech wrote: post #101
bobsmooth wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

There's a large tradition of having texts translated into Russian, whereas English speakers would very rarely read anything translated from another language.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#140

Post by yakak »

raverbashing wrote: post #133
cyphar wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several reasons a language can go extinct, and while the reasons you mentioned are included there are several other reasons that you didn't consider. The most common way language death occurs is through contact with a prestige language, which results in social pressure that makes the non-prestige language become less and less commonly spoken[1]. A community becoming bilingual is part of this process -- it d…

Icelandic won't disappear soon. (it's a bit of a mistake to say latin disappeared but I digress) It might take some work (and more media being produced in it, surely) but I don't think it's at risk > because smartphones do not support their native language Nowhere in the article says that. And most smartphones do even have support (including the Icelandic keyboard) what is not supported is voice activated devices: >…

By your criteria no language that has survived to now will disappear without a major global calamity. Effectively, latin is a not a language for a native speaker that wants to go through their life and leave future native speakers.

Regarding Icelandic, I know little about it except that it has a lot of non-ANSI if written properly. I already know many latin language dialect speakers that developed their behavior when the limits of SMS unicode were significantly smaller than ANSI, with long term repercussions. I'm not sure why facts like that would need to be in the article to discuss here?

Post reply on HN