[Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

[Mathieu Stumpf]

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/