Hoi,
When we invest in MT it is to convey knowledge, information and primarily
Wikipedia articles. They do not have the same problems poetry has. With
explanatory articles on a subject there is a web of associated concepts.
These concepts are likely to occur in any language if the subject exists in
that other language.
Consequently MT can work for Wikipedia and provide quite a solid
interpretation of what the article is about. This is helped when the
associated concepts are recognised as such and when the translations for
these concepts are used in the MT.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 26 April 2013 10:38, Mathieu Stumpf <psychoslave(a)culture-libre.org>wrote;wrote:
Le 2013-04-25 20:56, Theo10011 a écrit :
As far as Linguistic typology goes, it's far too unique and too varied to
have a language independent form develop as
easily. Perhaps it also
depends
on the perspective. For example, the majority of people commenting here
(Americans, Europeans) might have exposure to a limited set of a
linguistic
branch. Machine-translations as someone pointed out, are still not
preferred in some languages, even with years of research and potentially
unlimited resources at Google's disposal, they still come out sounding
clunky in some ways. And perhaps they will never get to the level of
absolute, where they are truly language independent.
To my mind, there's no such thing as "absolute" meaning. It's all
about
intrepretation in a given a context by a given interpreter. I mean, I do
think that MT could probably be as good as a profesional translators. But
even profesional translators can't make "perfect translations". I already
gave the example of poetry, but you may also take example of humour, which
ask for some cultural background, otherwise you have to explain why it's
funny and you know that you have to explain a joke, it's not a joke.
If you read some of
the discussions in linguistic relativity
(Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), there
is
research to suggest that a language a person is born with dictates their
thought processes and their view of the world - there might not be
absolutes when it comes to linguistic cognition. There is something
inherently unique in the cognitive patterns of different languages.
That's just how learning process work, you can't "understand"
something
you didn't experiment. Reading an algorithm won't give you the insight
you'll get when you process it mentaly (with the help of pencil and paper)
and a textual description of "making love" won't provide you the feeling
it
provide.
Which brings me to the point, why not English? Your idea seems plausible
enough even if your remove the abstract idea of
complete language
universality, without venturing into the science-fiction labyrinth of
man-machine collaboration.
English have many so called "non-neutral" problems. As far as I know, if
the goal is to use syntactically unambiguous human language, lojban is the
best current candidate. English as an international language is a very
harmful situation. Believe it or not, but I sometime have to translate to
English sentences which are written in French, because the writer was
thinking with English idiomatic locution that he poorly translated to
French, its native language in which it doesn't know the idiomatic
locution. Even worst, I red people which where where using concepts with an
English locution because they never matched it with the French locution
that they know. And in the other way, I'm not sure that having millions of
people speaking a broken English is a wonderful situation for this language.
Search "why not english as international language" if you need more
documentation.
--
Association Culture-Libre
http://www.culture-libre.org/
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