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Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

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Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#21

Post by James_K »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #6
pjsg wrote: post #5

The article seems to think that a word is untranslateable if there is no single word in the target language. If I'm not misreading the article, then this is completely obvious -- just consider the number of words in English and the number of words in almost any other language, and you will find that there are more English words than the other language. It is now clear that there exist English words that don't corresp…

That isn’t a proof. Synonyms can bolster the enumeration sans augmenting novelty.

I think the reasonable reader will conclude it's unlikely for any two languages to share exactly the same vocabulary, accounting for synonyms.

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#22

Post by triclops200 »

This article assumes that concepts are somehow precise coordinates within a single language; that's not the case, at best, speakers of a language mutually approximate a relatively consistent representation, but like, look at a word like yeet or whatever: we decided as a society on its meaning while it was being developed, as it were. Furthermore, it never rigorously defines what it means by translation. It claims 上京 is a single basis meaning moving to Tokyo, for example, but that isn't even an accurate translation: the individual components represent superior/greater/above and Tokyo and as an idiomatic phrase it represents the concept of moving to the capital for a better life. Something like "moving on up" or the like in some vernaculars of English, and idioms translating to idioms is a form of translation. It's disingenuous to represent the first concept as a single basis but not the second. Similarly, it claims mono no aware (物の哀れ) is unable to be translated, but, again, more literally "translated" is saying "the sorrow within things" character by character, and, only as an idiom has the full contextual understanding. It's not really a single point even if it's rather accurately located in a hypothetical embedding space by Japanese speakers. Imo, an English translation of the concept is "everything is dust in the wind", only 2 more individual conceptual units than the original Japanese phrase, and 3 of them are mainly just connecting words, but it's understood as a similar idiom/concept, here.

Concepts are only usefully distinguished by context and use.

By the author's own argumentation: nothing is translatable (or, generally, even communicatable) unless it has a fixed relative configuration to all other concepts that is precisely equivalent. In practice, we handle the fuzziness as part of communication and its useless to try and define a concept as untranslatable unless you're also of the camp that nothing is ever communicated (in which case, this response to the author's post is completely useless as nobody could possibly understand it enough internally for it to be useful. If you've read this far, congrats on squaring the circle somehow)

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#23

Post by adrian_b »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #14
seanhunter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure this approach really accounts for the difference between a language like German where you have one compound word for a concept that would require multiple words in English. For one good example, the German "Nomenkompositum" is "compound noun" in English.

That's just a difference in orthography. English could easily have had an orthographic standard where we write "compoundnoun" for compounds. This is in contrast with a language like French, where compound nouns are relatively rare. Compare English "Olive oil" and German "Olivenöl" with French "huile d' olive". In French you need to have a preposition to combine the two nouns, whereas English and German do noun-noun c…

You are right but neither yours nor those of the previous posters are good examples of compound nouns.

These examples have just the meanings of a noun + adjective or of a noun + noun in genitive case, where some languages are lazier than others and omit the markers of case or of adjectival derivation from noun, which are needed in more strict languages.

There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words, but only some related meaning (usually either a pars pro toto meaning or a metaphorical meaning). Those are true compound nouns, not just abbreviated sequences of words from which the grammatical markers have been omitted.

Such compound words were very frequent in Ancient Greek, from where they have been inherited in the scientific and technical language, where they have been used to create names for new things and concepts, e.g. arthropod, television, phonograph, basketball, "bullet train" and so on.

This kind of compound words are almost never translatable, but they are frequently borrowed from one language to another and during the borrowing process sometimes the component words are translated, but the result is not a translated word, it is a new word that is added to the destination language.

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#25

Post by MangoToupe »

proteal wrote: post #17

I think a succinct way to describe my thoughts on linear algebra/language is that language has high dimensionality (ie many different basis vectors that may not necessarily be orthogonal) and that individual languages use a unique coordinate system to express thought. Each language is a lossy approximation of all conceivable thought and some languages can more efficiently represent the “all thoughts” vector space bec…

> Each language is a lossy approximation of all conceivable thought

I'm not quite sure I understand this—I do have mental sensations/processes sans language, but I would not characterize them as "thoughts". To me, a thought is inherently linguistic, even if they relate to non-linguistic mental processes. So to me, learning a new language is very literally learning how to think differently.

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#26

Post by mannykannot »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #6
pjsg wrote: post #5

The article seems to think that a word is untranslateable if there is no single word in the target language. If I'm not misreading the article, then this is completely obvious -- just consider the number of words in English and the number of words in almost any other language, and you will find that there are more English words than the other language. It is now clear that there exist English words that don't corresp…

That isn’t a proof. Synonyms can bolster the enumeration sans augmenting novelty.

True, but many languages now have words that were absent from their earlier vocabularies. Shakespeare did not have the option to use 'telephone', 'semiconductor' or 'entropy'.

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#28

Post by tptacek »

epistasis wrote: post #19

> If the mere sight of the above is like a punch in the face for you, don't worry. I'm not going to math you to death in what follows. I will only remind you of a tiny basic part of it that I think relates to languages. Yes, that mathematical expression is like a punch in my face, but not for the reason you think. I am offended that the rank of the matrix does not match the dimension of the matrix, not that I'm seein…

It's a 3x3 matrix with 3 independent rows. The rank matches the dimension.

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#29

Post by ralferoo »

There's one aspect that I think the article starts to hint at, but doesn't quite make the jump to is that words in a language just map to a subset of concepts that don't necessarily have the same subset boundaries in other languages.

If you think back to the meme from a decade or two ago about how men and women perceive colour [1], where e.g. "pink" to a man covers a whole range of colours to a woman, then that kind of hints at the idea.

One example back in the realm of vocabulary is the English word "happy". This embodies a range of meanings from joy, willingness, pleased, contentment, satiation, etc. There might be some overlap in some of these meanings with other words like "joy" or "excited", that don't have the same overlaps in other languages. E.g. "happy" might be translated to French as "heureuse" for the senses of pleased or content, but not for willingness sense.

Similarly, the French word "dommage" can be translated into a whole bunch of English words that aren't normally synonyms of each other - pity, damage, shame, harm.

This kind of nuance can lead to two opposite problems when translating - when the meaning is limited to a subset of possible meanings by context, and the wrong one is chosen in the foreign language, and when the author's meaning embodied multiple meanings and the chosen translation doesn't cover all of them.

Some of these features can lead to the humour in subtle jokes being lost in translation, e.g. "he'd be late to his own funeral".

[1] e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-babble/201504/... or https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/male-vs-female-color-perc...

Re: Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

#30

Post by trostaft »

epistasis wrote: post #19

> If the mere sight of the above is like a punch in the face for you, don't worry. I'm not going to math you to death in what follows. I will only remind you of a tiny basic part of it that I think relates to languages. Yes, that mathematical expression is like a punch in my face, but not for the reason you think. I am offended that the rank of the matrix does not match the dimension of the matrix, not that I'm seein…

You probably mean that the size of the matrix is incompatible with the size of the vector?
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