Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable

My personal analogy, useful in my early days: Translating is like finding a vector in another space that points in the same direction or carries a similar magnitude of meaning.

In other words:

The source sentence is a vector in “language A space.”

The target sentence is a vector in “language B space.”

A good translation finds a vector that has the same direction (same meaning, intent, tone) even though it lies in a different coordinate system (the new language).

Some giant portion of English vocabulary actually are compound words. English loves using compound words but only if the roots are sourced from Latin or Greek: words like electrocardiogram ("electronic heart picture", sourced from Greek), agriculture ("field nurturing", from Latin), and telecommunication ("far sharing", a hybrid of Latin and Greek roots). Probably the overwhelming majority of the words in an English dictionary will be compound words, and people regularly coin neologisms ("new words") using this formula.

An English speaker might be willing to accept componoma ("names placed together", Latin) or synthetonoma (also "names placed together", Greek) without breaking stride.

What a trendy article, in tune with our recently linear-algebraic turn in how we see language thanks to LLM's.

But I think this exposes an even greater problem, where words thought to be direct translations will always drift in vector value as they are weighted for attention within their respective corpora. Are we on the brink of translation-nihilism?

This isn't even limited to complex phenomena or shades of snow. Even "I like" is a different construction in many languages, in an unexpected way to new language learners.

There's a real irony that the examples are coming from Japanese since it is an agglutinative language.

I think people don't realize how weird language is. Like you could look at Chinese and call each sentence a "word" as there are no spaces. What's the difference between that and a compound word like "nighttime" or the whole German language where you got words like Krankenwagen ("patient" + "car").

Now this doesn't mean there aren't words or phrases that aren't translatable. But the thing is we can always translate the words themselves. What we can't always translate is the meaning behind them. I think the best example of this comes from Star Trek and the Tamarian Language[0,1]. "Sokath, his eyes open!" The problem with communication is not that the words don't translate, it is that the meaning behind them doesn't. Just as people struggle with idioms when learning American English or why someone might be confused about why someone "shit in the milk" or "fucked the dog". Words are an embedding. A compression.

The thing people are constantly forgetting, but is more important than ever in a globally connected world, is that words are not perfect representations of thoughts. We compress our thoughts into them and hope the person on the other side can decompress them. It is why you can more easily communicate with your close friends who have better context than you can with another person that natively speaks your language and is why someone that learns a new language can speak perfectly well but still struggle to communicate. Language is not just words, it is culture[2]. So in a much more connected world today we have these disconnects in culture and thus interpretation of what people say. I know every one of you has been told to "speak to your audience" but how do you speak to your audience when your audience is everybody and when you don't know who your audience is? The new paradigm requires us to be much better interpreters than we were before. Least everyone is going to sound crazy, other than those you frequently talk to and have that shared understanding.

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tamarian_language

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-wzr74d7TI

[2] This is, btw, why people argue for embodied AI being so critical. Not because LLMs can't appear to grasp the language, but because we as humans have embodied our language so deeply you probably didn't even realize that I used the word "grasp" to refer to an abstract concept and not something you can actually touch with your hand.

What sticks out to me is that the first word in these ends with a vowel so they don't sound like compound words.