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No Language Left Behind

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Re: No Language Left Behind

#141

Post by mensetmanusman »

protomyth wrote: post #91
hello_im_angela wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We interviewed speakers of low-resource languages from all over the world to understand the human need for this kind of technology --- what do people actually want, how would they use it, and what's the quality they would find useful? Many low-resource languages lack data online, but are spoken by millions. However, many indigenous languages are spoken by smaller numbers of people, and we are definitely interested in…

I'll take that in good faith, but I will say Facebook has been a particular pain for many tribal folks given its true name policy and banning people who it thinks are using a fake name. Yellow Horse was one that was wildly reported, but their are others. Mostly anything that takes the form Adjective Noun. Had a rather painful thread with someone claiming to be a Facebook employee that defended this practice. I haven'…

I was unfamiliar with this issue. Was their name Yellow Horse in English? Or was it supposed to be written in a language not available so an English translation was used?

I have a feeling that if it was written in the original language it would go through, since many English names also have adjective noun original meanings like ‘beautiful flower’.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#142

Post by _nalply »

"No Language Left Behind" - really?

Did the people at Meta think about the Signed Languages of the Deaf?

I didn't find a mention. Even Ctrl-F deaf didn't yield anything.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#143

Post by pegasus »

Gigachad wrote: post #107
azinman2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's a silly thing to wish for: like wishing global warming kills off as many species of animals as possible, in order to simplify zoology.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#144

Post by [deleted] »

Gigachad wrote: post #107
azinman2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: No Language Left Behind

#145

Post by debesyla »

thriftwy wrote: post #139
aeontech wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Tradition" sounds a bit funny knowing that a lot of Russian book publishing was/is published without author permission. Russian publishing isn't well known for following copyright laws :V

Re: No Language Left Behind

#146

Post by eCa »

MrPatan wrote: post #137
eCa wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don’t think I my prospects in any way is hindered by being a native speaker of a fairly small language. If anything, I prefer having English as a second language.

How would you feel if your kids only learned Chinese[1], and not a word of English?

[1] I’m assuming you’re not Chinese

Re: No Language Left Behind

#148

Post by hello_im_angela »

kgeist wrote: post #108

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 versat…

We represent all languages in their natural script, rather than transliterating them into a common synthetic one.

Regarding Mari: extremely interesting language, exciting to hear that you are from that region. We are interested in working on this one (likely in the "Hill Mari" variant), but currently do not support it.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#149

Post by thriftwy »

debesyla wrote: post #145
thriftwy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Tradition" sounds a bit funny knowing that a lot of Russian book publishing was/is published without author permission. Russian publishing isn't well known for following copyright laws :V

I'm pretty sure that Russian (Soviet?) publishers observed whatever copyright laws there were at the time. It's just that international copyright law is a recent phenomenon. USA is also a very late signatory of international book copyright treaties AFAIK.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#150

Post by otreblatercero »

bertil wrote: post #138
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.

For náhuatl, I found this: Wikipedia in nahuatl https://nah.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal%C4%ABxatl
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